My daughter is a little over two, and through well meaning family and friends we have more toys than we know what to do with.

My wife keeps buying what are essentially (fancy looking) big boxes and just dumping everything in them. Love my wife, but that’s not working, it’s just hiding some of the mess in a box.

We end up with these hardly ever opened boxes full of unorganized piles of toys that we end up having to dig through to find anything specific, and the toys that my daughter is actively using just end up scattered around the floor so they don’t disappear into the box dimension.

Every once in a while my daughter opens and digs through the boxes and dumps half the contents on the floor anyway (not like she can see specific things to grab what she wants) and then we just kind of arbitrarily choose some of it to put back in the box and a new combination of mess to leave out.

Unfortunately we have another baby on the way, so I’m probably not getting my wife to let us toss any of it right now.

I’m leaning towards cubby shelves with individual bins for different “types” of toys like her daycare does, but I wanted to hear what strategies other parents tried, and what has and hasn’t worked.