Keep Your Child's Play Kitchen Organized With This Shoe Rack Storage Solution

A child's imagination is a wondrous thing. While your kids or grandkids might be able to dream up a rocket ship from a cardboard box, sometimes it's fun to help their imaginative powers thrive with items that optimize their play space. If your children's play food and utensils are always under foot, there's a practical and accessible way to better organize these items. Using an old shoe rack, you can create a mock food pantry or storage unit, which can facilitate a more orderly play area.

Creating a storage solution for your child's play kitchen area is simple, and most wooden shoe racks will work well. If you don't have a wooden shoe rack available, the IKEA VASSKÄR Hallway furniture piece ($29.98) is a versatile option. If you like the thrill of the hunt, thrift stores can be treasure troves for finding bamboo shoe racks, too. Along with a shoe rack, you'll need some baskets or bins to hold their various playthings. Consider open containers, which are often praised when it comes to children's toy storage — by taking lids out of the equation, you will make it easier for your kids to access items for play and clean up. Mixing and matching whatever baskets accommodate your shelves is an economical and viable way to get your kids' play kitchen rack organized. For an aesthetic execution of this solution, you can also go for matching woven baskets, like IKEA's MJÖLKKANNA Basket ($14.99); just double check the shelves' dimensions before committing to a specific basket.

Simple solutions like this are extra fun to carry out because they provide a blank canvas that you can personalize to your heart's contentment. With this storage solution, make it feel more like your own in any number of ways. Firstly, you can paint the shoe rack a neutral color like white or gray, or embrace your child's favorite hue for a cheerful pop of color. The same goes for the containers on the shelves — while natural fiber baskets are undeniably soothing, opting for colored bins is yet another way to bring a playful vibe to the solution. For bargain shoppers, Dollar Tree has a surprising selection of small bins that can serve as containers for the shoe-rack-turned-play-kitchen-storage. Another choice is to DIY an affordable storage basket using toilet paper rolls and jute, which can keep costs down while delivering satisfying results.

To keep play utensils and cookware easily within reach, consider installing adhesive hooks to the sides of the rack so these items can hang. If you want your kids' play kitchen storage solution to look a little more integrated and domestic, why not try adding a tension rod with a curtain to cover up the contents? This simple way of hiding kitchen storage space in style comes courtesy of Nate Berkus and you can use any beautiful fabric you have leftover from your last project. If this storage project has your wheels turning, here are 12 IKEA storage solutions that help keep playrooms organized.