The Magic of tidying- Your dog's Toy Box

Like loads of people all over the world, I too have discovered the joy of tidying up with the KonMari method. Now, I haven't gone through the whole process for myself but this week I decided to apply some Marie Kondo's techniques to tackle my dogs toy box.

Like many dogs my two love toys, they like chasing them, chewing them, pulling, tugging and skinning them. My jack Russel, Ella has an obsession with balls and will make you play fetch over and over and over. Mim, my Yorkie is a dreaded stuffing eater!
They do have their favorites and will continue to play with the left over skins but it does get to the point when the box no longer contains anything that resembles what they were to begin with.

It's also a chance to give all the toys a good clean. If you can't safely clean a toy then you may want to dispose of it after it's been played with. Of course if you've read my blog before you will know that I'm not a big fan of waste and as I found during this process, trying to dispose of dog toys without them going to landfill is a challenge that most owners wouldn't tackle.

The first thing I did was to let the dogs outside so that I could put the toy box in the living room with out getting them all excited. If I had allowed the dogs to decided what toys "Sparks Joy" we would have to keep everything!

So this our dogs toy box, as you can see there are a load of them! We a have a varied selection, I also have a an empty box which I will be using to separate the toys when I'm done.

You can scroll through the photos to get an idea of my method.
After going through all the toys I took the keep pile in the box and washed all the toys and the box.
I just used hot soapy water and a scrubber (not the same one I use for the dishes!) to wash all the toys. Now I didn't have many plush toys but if you do you could put them through the washing machine (if you do this I would recommend that you put them in a wash bag).

After washing, I left them on the side to air dry. I was actually really grossed out by how clean they looked! It just goes to show how dirty they really were!

Once all the toys were dry it was just a case of putting them away.
I decided not to let the dogs have access to all the toys all of the time, using another box inside the toy box to separate them.

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Now I just had to take out the box of old toys, but as I should have said at the beginning, you should probably do a quick whip round before you start shorting or may have a similar experience to me as I detail in the slide show below!

So this is definitely something that I'm going to start doing more often, it didn't really take all that long but next week I'll follow up with the fate of the discarded toys!
Please comment below if you have given this a go, I'd love them to see them!