Game Closet Makeover

We love to play games over here. Of course, we haven't quite entered the world of unending Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders until you turn blue.in.the.face but in the land of grown-up games we have a lot of fun. Unfortunately, our game closet looked like the cardboard monster attacked. Missing pieces, crushed cardboard boxes, and having to wear a hard hat every time I went to grab Skip-Bo finally pushed my OCD button. I am so.so.SO happy with the closet now. Everything labeled nicely and in it's place... makes a girl sleep well at night, ya know?

 

There are probably 50 gajillion ways to organize games but here is what I did. I first pulled down all my games and figured out how many I had. Then I went to Target (my home away from hooooome! Who's with me?!) and found these awesome storage bins. 

I picked out two sizes because I had a few games that needed a slightly bigger box. My end goal was a more compact storage system so I didn't want to get all large boxes. I emptied all the pieces into the pretty boxes and got rid of a massive amount of trashed cardboard boxes. Huzzah! (Ok, I admit, I had a slight panic attack when I threw out the first box. What if I needed that?! Someday in 80 years that might be a collectable! What if I need to look at the picture of the sterotypical family of 4 with one boy and one girl dressed in clean matching clothes and eating tofu for dinner while playing Scrabble?! ........ I got over it pretty quick...) For the board games, I took all the boards and put them in a plastic magazine holder that sits next to the boxes.

I always planned to make labeled tabs for each board so that we could easily grab what we needed, however, I never got around to it. We've been able to find the boards we need pretty quickly without the tabs but I think it would be nice to have them labeled. Speaking of labels, see all those cute ones on the game boxes? Have I mentioned I love my Cricut? No? ILOVEMYCRICUT!

Anyhoo. 

That's our game closet! I love love love how it works for us in our space. But you have to find what works for you the best. I did something similar to this at my mom's house but they had SO many games it would have cost a small fortune to buy that many plastic bins. Instead we found two large bins and organized the bags in large Ziplock bags. She stores her games in a cabinet so the boards are kept on the small shelf with the games below. When we labeled all the bags we used a different color marker to distinguish the games with boards

When everything is labeled, organized, and has a 'home' I just feel all giddy inside. Sigh. My husband says I'm hard to please sometimes. Maybe if he would just color code his ties and alphabetize his wallet?