Ideas for storing toys in a children's room

Design ideas and possible configurations with photos

Shelves for children are classified according to age:

• From one to three years, it is enough to build one section with several shelves for toys.
• From 3 to 6 years, storage systems become more functional. Here you will already need to make several boxes for toys that will be interconnected.
• From 6 to 10 years old it is already possible to make spacious shelving for the floor of the wall. They will be convenient for storing not only toys, but also school supplies.

As for the design for boys, discreet tones are chosen in the design. They can make furniture in the form of a ship, garage or fortress. And girls can build a rack for toys in bright colors and with different decor, for which models in the form of castles or small houses are often selected.

Attention: by selecting a neutral color for the shelving, as the child grows older, it can be supplemented with new sections.

Types by type of construction

Regular shelves

They are suitable for all age categories. From the first days of a baby’s life, they can be used to store personal hygiene products, then toys and textbooks.

Pull-out shelves

Such storage systems are convenient for board games and puzzles. After the game, the structure slides into place, freeing up free space in the room. Keep in mind that for safety, the structure must be additionally equipped with stoppers.

Square cells

For small children, such furniture is placed horizontally. This way the baby will be able to reach any thing and then put it back in its place. As the child grows, the square cells can be placed vertically.

Modules of different heights

This solution is quite original and convenient. This design can be used for active games, and the child will easily get his toys out of it.

Pull-out boxes

They can be made from various materials (plastic, textile, wood). Pull-out boxes are installed at the bottom of the rack. It is convenient to store toys in them, and you can also assemble puzzles. When your baby gets tired of playing, you just need to push the box back into the rack.

Types by type of accommodation

Floor-standing

They are quite spacious structures. Such models can be symmetrical, asymmetrical or interesting shapes. The back wall, which supports the entire structure, is responsible for the stability of the floor shelving.

Corner

They are space-saving and compact in size. With this design, there will be plenty of space in the room for active games. The corner design will help you rationally use every free centimeter of the room ; it is distinguished by its original appearance, practicality and ease of use.

Full height of the wall

Such models are distinguished by spaciousness, practicality, and functionality. They fit a large number of things.

Types of shelves in a children's room

All kinds of shelves are used in the design of a children's room. An important selection criterion is the child’s height. The size of the furniture should allow him to independently take the toys he likes.

There are several types of children's wall shelves:

• Wall-mounted - save space for outdoor games, reading, sports or creativity. They remain the most popular and functional, have a low price, and are easy to attach.

When choosing wall shelves, you should rely on the overall style of the room.

• Wall mounted – suitable for storing books. When decorating a nursery for a small child, it is better to choose shelves with a special side. You can diversify the interior with options on loops or ropes. They give the room individuality and highlight the unusual design. Bookshelves must be firmly secured to the wall to prevent them from falling. The general style of the room dictates the features of shape and color.

• Floor-standing - have several rows that are mounted on side racks. They are roomy and functional.

• Corner - allow you to rationally use the free space of a small room. With their help, it is convenient to create a separate reading or gaming area. A soft rug or bean bag chair is usually placed under the shelf.

When choosing children's shelves, their future location plays an important role. Accommodation options:

1. Above the bed. For safety, the shelf should be lightweight. It is not recommended to store heavy or fragile items on it.
2. Around the window. Using this option you can save space in small rooms.
3. In the desk. Allows you to teach children to maintain order and be less distracted by searching for the necessary items.
4. As part of the bed. To create a small area for games and reading, shelves are installed at the head of the bed or under the bed.

Expert opinion

Olga Kovalenko

Since 2010 I have been engaged in interior design and architectural design.

You need to choose the type of shelves that will fit into the interior of a particular children's room.

Material selection

Shelving for children's rooms is made of different materials:

1. Plastic. It is manufactured using modern technologies, thanks to which it is durable and able to withstand heavy mechanical loads. On such a rack you can place a large number of toys, and it will not bend under their weight.
   The main advantages of plastic structures include:
   • ergonomics;

   ease of assembly;

2. light weight;
3. resistance to mold and fungi;
4. low cost;
5. material safety.
6. Tree. This material is natural and safe. Different types of wood have their own unique texture. The material is easy and pleasant to work with. It is sawed and cut with various electric tools. Depending on the design of the rack, the wooden structure can be given any shape.
   The characteristics of wood include not only its environmental friendliness, but also:
   • unique texture;

   the presence of an unobtrusive aroma of wood;

7. durability.

Help: Wood is resistant to mechanical damage.

With proper use, such furniture will last about half a century without losing its aesthetics and original qualities.

8. Wood and metal. Such options for combining materials are in great demand. The metal frame is able to withstand heavy loads without succumbing to deformation. Shelves, doors and other elements are made from wood. Such designs are suitable for both modern and classic nursery interiors and are distinguished by their originality and ease of use.

Children's wall shelves

Small and lightweight in high-tech style will be used for notebooks, albums, pencils, and toys. They do not require special fastening and are easy to fix on the wall.

Fixed for TV, a collection of books, and can withstand heavy loads. Reliable brackets serve as fastening for them.

Various original designs are shown in the photo of shelves for the nursery, which are used to store things and decorate the interior of the room.

Manufacturers have long moved away from producing only standard rectangular shelves. Designers have recently been developing bold versions of a wide variety of shapes.

Today you can buy shelves for the wall in the nursery of any shape:

• round;
• semicircular;
• rhombic;
• triangular;
• curved.

They are also made in the form of houses and large letters. They can be attached to ropes or cables to look like a hanging swing.

Combinations of several shelves of different types will make the room especially cozy and attractive not only for children.

But you shouldn’t overload the room with children’s hanging shelves. A large number of them will turn a cozy room into an unattractive school library. Therefore, before placing them in a room, you can first look at successful options for their placement on the Internet.

How to make such furniture from scrap materials?

You can make a shelf for a nursery not only from plastic, wood or metal, but also from the simplest available materials.

From the boxes

In this way, exclusive designs are created that can be arranged in a checkerboard pattern. To decorate the lower shelves, you can glue felt pads to them.

From cardboard boxes

This option is suitable for light-weight items and toys. To prevent boxes of toys from falling on the floor, they must be carefully secured to the wall. You can independently adjust the depth of a rack of cardboard boxes by simply cutting it. To make the walls more durable and beautiful, they will need to be covered with wallpaper or colored cardboard.

For decoration, appliqués, children's handprints, personal photographs from a family album or stickers are used.

Rack dimensions

To make it convenient for a child not only to get toys, books, and construction sets for games, but also to put them back in place independently, the rack must have open shelves, be located at the height of the child, be reliable enough, and therefore stand on the floor. This is exactly the kind of rack that appeared in our house, and it was made in the “do-it-yourself” style. In my youngest son’s room there is a wall that is not filled with furniture; it is there that I decided to place new shelves for toys, books and other useful things. Therefore, after measuring the free space, I decided that the rack would have the following dimensions:

• 150 centimeters in height;
• 180 centimeters in length;
• 30 centimeters wide.

The width of the rack was determined on its own - my husband gave me exactly the same width of boards to make the rack.

The rack, despite its dimensions, is visually light and transparent - it has no back or side surfaces, since the shelves rest on racks.

What will be needed for production?

Having decided to make a shelving unit for the children's room with your own hands, you will need:

1. select consumables and tools;
2. make a preliminary drawing;
3. assemble the shelf according to the diagram and fix it on the wall;
4. decorate the furniture structure.

As for the choice of material. A shelving unit for a child’s room can be made from textiles, plastic, wood and metal. We will consider the option of making a shelf from natural wood or chipboard.

Attention: when making a wooden shelving unit, you must have carpentry skills.

Before you begin manufacturing parts and assembling a structure for storing toys, you will also need to make a drawing or diagram of the future product. It is drawn with a simple pencil on paper in three different projections. This diagram indicates the exact dimensions of all parts, methods of fastening them together, and materials of manufacture.

Tools you will need:

• electric jigsaw;
• sanding machine or sandpaper;
• screwdriver;
• Ruler and pencil.

The process of making a shelving unit for a nursery is as follows:

1. First, the frame is assembled from the side, top and bottom shelves.
2. The back wall is made of ordinary plywood.
3. Next, shelves with dividers are made.
4. Grooves are cut out on the finished parts.
5. All joints are coated with glue and dried.
6. Next, the shelves are connected to each other with nails and additionally glued.
7. The back wall is also nailed with furniture nails.
8. To install the drawers, special furniture casters are used.
9. The finished structure is processed with sandpaper and decorated.

Attention: since the tree is quite heavy in weight, it is better to additionally strengthen the structure with metal corners to the wall.

Preparation of shelves

My husband had plywood boards, 30 centimeters wide, in stock; they were left over from his previous works. When I decided on the length of the shelves, my husband cut the boards to the length I specified using an electric saw. All edges were then sanded with fine sandpaper. To make the rack I needed 5 identical boards. Holes for fasteners were drilled on the boards. Their arrangement is as follows - two holes at the edges with an indentation of 10 and 2 holes with an indentation of 25 centimeters from the end and one hole in the middle.

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I painted the finished boards white with glossy acrylic paint. This work was done using a roller.

Decor

To give a wooden structure for toys aesthetics, it must be decorated. For this purpose:

• Paints and varnishes. The product can be coated with stain and varnish in several layers. And to make the room more cheerful and bright, you can paint the shelves with multi-colored paints. The main thing here is to choose non-toxic and safe materials, without a strong odor.
• Various decorative elements: butterflies, ribbons, flowers. They can be made either with your own hands or purchased ready-made in a store.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that the presence of a rack for things and toys in the nursery will teach the baby to order from early childhood. Also, such furniture designs will delight owners with their original appearance, functionality, versatility and practicality.

Making bars

In order to make the vertical posts and legs of the rack, I chose a wooden block with a square section of 5x5 centimeters. The height of 14 bars for raising the upper shelves to a height of 35 centimeters, for the two lower ones I sawed off 9 pieces of bars 20 centimeters high. The 4 legs are made from the same block, but their height is only 12 centimeters.

I carefully cleaned all the cuts until smooth using a sanding machine - first with coarse grains, and then with fine grains. When performing this work, you need to try not to disturb the geometry of the surface - both sides must be parallel to each other so that the shelf does not warp during assembly. The edges of the bars were also slightly ground using a grinder, because the rack was made for a nursery, and therefore it had to be as safe as possible. But the sides of the bars remained practically untreated, this gave them some kind of natural charm. Before painting, I coated all the bars with acrylic primer.

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Advantages of shelving

In a children's room, it is very important to place things correctly, organizing comfortable free space and at the same time providing the child with easy access to the necessary items. Therefore, using children's racks you can achieve multifunctionality and compactness. In addition, the advantages of this type of furniture include the following characteristics:

• The ability to independently select the sizes of both shelves and the entire structure. Over time, you can add or remove individual sections, build on them, or move the entire rack;
• Direct access to the required item. This is especially important if the child is very young. To find the necessary toy in this case, you do not need to open the doors (this can be traumatic) or turn over the basket with toys;
• Children's cabinets and racks perform such an important function as unobtrusively teaching the child to put things in order. You can, for example, determine a place for each toy and place them in their places every evening, sending them all to their little “houses”;
• the possibility of using this type of furniture as a space delimiter during zoning, and not just in an attached form. Important! If the structure will serve as an additional wall, then special care must be taken to ensure its stability, securely fastening it to the floor and ceiling.
• Versatility. As you grow older, you can use the rack not only for toys, but also for books, textbooks, placing collectible models or other items;
• Aesthetics. Shelving looks neat and attractive, making the room more organized, even if it is a little cluttered.

Those who have not yet made a choice when furnishing a children's room should pay special attention to shelving - a functional and practical element of furniture, the selection rules and main types of which are given below.

Why is this necessary?

It is fair to say that children's book and toy shelves are a type of very practical furniture.

They are installed in children's rooms, regardless of the age of the baby. The rack will be useful for both a baby from 1 year and a teenager.

The rack can be used to store and place:

• toys;
• books;
• notebooks;
• textbooks;
• offices;
• TV;
• computer;
• clothes;
• bed linen;
• gadgets;
• flowers, etc.

The rack can be bought ready-made at Ikea or other specialized stores. Now, for example, Montessori bookshelves, where books are placed facing the child, are in demand. It is believed that psychologically this pushes people to read more.

Some assemble furniture with their own hands. It all depends on your wishes.

In addition to classic shelves, the rack can be supplemented with other useful elements.

In particular, this could be a bed or a desk.

For the little ones, you can order a rack made in the shape of a castle, tree, ship or something similar and unusual, attracting children's attention. This way the rack will become part of the game.

Among the advantages of book and toy shelves are:

• multifunctionality of furniture;
• wide range of models;
• comfort when using;
• reliability;
• capacity;
• long service life;
• saving space in the room;
• safety;
• versatility;
• the ability to use one rack for many years;
• transformability of many models;
• ease of installation and dismantling.

I don’t recommend choosing based solely on photos. You need to touch the rack, inspect it from each side, and understand what material it is made of.

Don’t save on your children by buying used furniture on Avito and other sites. It’s better to buy a cheap rack from the same chipboard, but new.

It is unknown how the furniture was used before you, and what condition it will actually be in.