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Diana Rene: 0:06

You're listening to the Decluttered Mom podcast, a podcast built specifically for busy moms by a busy mom. I'm your host, Diana Rene, and in 2017, I had my second daughter and it felt like I was literally drowning in my home Okay, not literally, but I felt like I couldn't breathe with all of the stuff surrounding me. Over the next 10 months, I got rid of approximately 70% of our household belongings and I have never looked back. I kind of feel like I hacked the mom system and I'm here to share all the tips, tricks and encouragement. Let's listen to today's show. 

Today, we're going to talk about a simple organizational system in your home that a lot of people struggle with and a lot of people get really frustrated about. And I have a simple solution for you, and that is board games. If you have kids that are at the age that they are playing a lot of board games which, FYI, I know is such a fun age I still remember the exact moment when my kids were old enough to be able to actually number one understand, but number two, enjoy playing a board game, and we just played as a whole family and it was so much fun. Honestly, it's probably one of my favorite things to do with my kids, who are now seven and 10, because it's just fun, they get it, it's entertaining, it is like a bonding thing and we just have a lot of fun together and we have our favorites. 

We have other games that my seven-year-old loves, that I don't really particularly love, but usually I can get them to agree to play certain games that we all will enjoy. I just remember when they were really little and I really wanted them to be able to play board games and they just didn't get it, obviously because they were too little to get it, but it's just been really fun ever since they did quote unquote get it. Board games tend to be something that frustrate a lot of people for a couple of reasons. Number one the boxes that board games come in are typically pretty big, and sometimes they need to be that big and sometimes, or a lot of times, they really don't need to be that big, and so they take up a lot of space, especially if you enjoy playing board games, and so you have quite a few. 

The other thing is that board game boxes tend to break and fall apart over time, especially if they are well-loved board games and they're constantly pulled out. The problem is, then it's really hard to organize either bulky boxes, because you need a lot of space for those boxes to go, and or boxes that are falling apart so you're losing pieces. They're falling off the shelf like nothing's staying together and it's frustrating. Those are the two big things that people come to me when they're trying to figure out how to organize board games. That are just the pain points. They're the things that really frustrate them about board games. I've even had people tell me we don't even have as many board games as I'd like, even though it's a fun activity for our family, because they frustrate me so much. I have a solution for you. 

This is something that we have been doing for years now, and this is yet another thing that people tend to either love or hate. When I tell them about it and that's A-OK If you try it and you hate it, no hard feelings. But a lot of the time people will try it and they love it and they never want to go back. What I do is I actually remove the game away from the box, I get rid of the boxes and I put them into bags. You might be thinking what's the point of that? Ok, there's a couple things. Number one it's going to drastically decrease the amount of space that the board game takes up, but it's also going to open up your storage options for those games. Because when you have like 18 big bulky boxes for games like you can't just stuff those anywhere, right, you have to have like a designated pretty large storage space and most people don't have that in their homes. 

Most people don't have storage Like it's not like a typical like open storage thing for most families. Most families are lacking storage and so when we take the game out and we put it into a bag and when I say a bag it can be all different sorts of things, so we have always used just Ziploc bags, like the Ziploc bags that you have the little zipper at the top. We do those and we get them in big sizes. So on Amazon you can get, like you know, mostly in the store typically the biggest size is a gallon, but you can get a three gallon, five gallon, 10 gallon on Amazon. So just depending on how big the games are that you're storing, I think we typically use the five gallon ones, but we just put each game into is a block bag, we write the name of the game, we put the instructions in the bag. That's a common question people have is like but what about like if the instructions are in the box, then that I feel like that doesn't happen as much anymore with games. Usually they're inside in a paper, but if they are on the box, I just cut them off of the box, just the instructions, that's it, and put that in with the game. 

So basically, everything that you need for the game is in this bag, and that is going to greatly cut down on the size needed for for the space needed for storage. It's also another thing. If you don't want to use Ziploc bags or you're having a hard time finding them in a big enough size, then you can go to the container store and they will have mesh zip top bags. You can probably also get those on Amazon now also, and you can get those in varying size too. Those are going to be more durable. They're going to last longer than Ziplocs. But we started with Ziplocs and we I just got so many because I had to buy them in bulk at the time when I first bought them, and so we just stick with that. But mesh like they're kind of. If you don't know what a mesh bag is it's? It's more like plastic. You're probably thinking mesh as in, like, like, like a, like a bag that you would put like delicates in in the wash. That's not what I'm talking about. I guess that could actually work too, but this is like a plastic, plasticky mesh bag, and that's. I'm going to have to just link it in the show notes because I'm doing a terrible job of trying to explain what I'm talking about. But they're sturdier and they come in all sorts of sizes and they zip on the top. So you can do either one of those. You can label them with a pretty label maker. You could just write them right on them with a Sharpie, which is what we do. And then this is what happens the storage options open up quite a bit. So for us, what what we do is we get the storage bins that go under, that are designed to go under your bed, so they're like long and flatter and we have several of those and they go under my girls beds and all the games go there.

So it's really nice because it's really out of sight and we just toss them in there. Sometimes you have to move around a little bit to fit right, but they just slide under the bed and they're good to go. I've had clients in the past that just have had like big plastic bins that they store in the garage and they put the games in there and they put the lid on and they shut it and they're good to go. This way you could also put it into drawers, like there's just there's so many different things that you could do or where you could store them. So if storage is an issue for you, this is another great thing. You just want to remember where you put them. That's the thing you don't want to like. I would. I would definitely not recommend like putting them all over the house, like putting them in this drawer in the family room and then also putting them in the guest room in this drawer, because then you're just going to lose them and forget about them. But you want to make sure that you have like designated spot for them. But the options are kind of limitless because you're not dealing with big bulky boxes anymore. 

So I hope this is helpful for you. Let me know on Instagram if it is. But I this is just something that I've had. I've been doing for years and years, and every time someone you know finds the idea from me on Instagram, they will like, send me a DM and they'll be like oh my gosh, this saved so much space and also saved so much frustration because I hate those boxes that always fall apart and they're so big and bulky. So I hope this was helpful for you today and I hope you will come back for next week's episode. Thanks for hanging out and listening to the decluttered mom podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world if you could write a review or share this episode with a friend or your Instagram stories. And if you're on Instagram, be sure to follow me at the decluttered mom and send me a DM to say hi. I'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. I hope you'll come back next week and hang out with us again.