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Ikea Brimnes Storage Cabinet
The best cabinet for hiding toys
You want to keep your family room looking tidy and modern. Your kids need a place to store their toys and trinkets. Then this cabinet will do the trick and satisfy both parties. And it won't break the bank! It is from Ikea, so there is assembly required. It takes longer to decide what level you want to place the shelves at than it does to assemble the entire cabinet.
If you are anything like me, you have a lot of stuff that you don’t really want to put on display. Endless amounts of arts and crafts supplies, science kits, Legos, character figures, and the dreaded contents of birthday party goodie bags. I do not want to have to look at them unless they are being used. When I sit down to watch tv once my kids are asleep, I like to look around the family room and not see any trace of little kids. It’s not that I want to pretend they don’t live there. I just enjoy having a glass of wine in an adult living space. Scattered toys and plastic storage bins do not make for an appealing adult living space.
After searching high and low, I finally came upon this cabinet on the Ikea website a few years ago. I pre-ordered it for pick up then headed to Ikea. I would say I had it assembled in under an hour. It worked like a charm to keep my then 4-year-old son’s Legos in one place.
A few months later, I went back and picked up another one. This time, I did not install the shelves. Instead, I installed a tension shower curtain rod and hung my then 3-year-old daughter’s costumes in it. Voila! A costume wardrobe just for her. Prior to that, her costumes hung in one of those costume storage closets that are open and have all the costumes visible. But a 3-year-old is not going to properly hang up her costumes so eventually the area looked so messy. The ability to close the doors and not have to see what was inside was awesome.
I had the two cabinets working very well. Then my 3-year-old stopped wearing her costumes on a daily basis (likely because she went to daycare and thus was not really allowed to wear them – I know she would have if she could). So, I moved her costumes up to the closet in her room and returned the shelves to her Ikea cabinet. I then filled it with her favorite: arts and crafts supplies. I then realized I needed to purchase another cabinet once my youngest started collecting things of her own.
And then, there were three. The newly purchased third cabinet became my daughter’s cabinet.
The items in the cabinets are always changing as the kids grow and their interests and collections change. But those Ikea Brimnes cabinets still remain one of the best purchases I made in my attempt to control the chaos that comes with two children who have a lot of stuff. It pleases the neat-freak in me who does not like disorder and very much dislikes looking at it, too.