Daycare Cubbies & Coat Lockers

Kids coat lockers, cubbies and classroom storage

Fern Kids builds coat lockers, cubby units and cubby storage for daycare, preschool and school classrooms, in solid Baltic birch, in Moorefield, Ontario. Units come in two, three, four, five and six sections, plus ten, twenty and thirty-section cubby units with clear bins — so a wall can be specified against your licensed capacity rather than against what happens to be in a catalogue. Where a standard unit doesn't fit the room, we build to size.

Four configurations: open lockers with hooks, shelf lockers with a shelf above the hook, seat lockers with a bench at the base, and cubby units with clear pull-out bins. Which one you want is a question about the room and the age group rather than the budget — the rest of this page walks through it.

Drop-off is the busiest ten minutes of the day. Coats, boots, backpacks, indoor shoes and a spare set of clothes all arrive at once, with parents standing in the room. What you put on that wall decides whether the next ten minutes are calm or not.

How many sections do you need?

Count children per room, not per centre, and add two. One for the child who joins in March, one for the spare mitts. A room of sixteen wants three six-section units rather than two eights — smaller units let you break the wall around a doorway or a window, and they move if you re-zone the room later.

Choosing by age

Infant rooms. Storage here is for the adults as much as the children: diapers, wipes, a change of clothes, the bottle bag. Look for closed or binned sections at caregiver height rather than open hooks a crawler can reach. Our cubby units with clear bins work well against an infant-room wall.

Toddler rooms. This is where independence starts and where the bench matters most. A seat locker lets a two-year-old sit down to pull boots off, which is the difference between a child doing it themselves and an educator doing it sixteen times. Hooks go low — low enough that a toddler reaching up can still see the hook.

Preschool and JK. Open fronts, one section each, labelled with a name and a photo. By four, children manage their own belongings if the storage lets them. Taller sections take a backpack without crushing it; a shelf above holds the indoor shoes.

Hooks, shelves, seats or bins

Four configurations, and the choice is about the room rather than the budget.

• Open lockers — hooks and an open front. Fastest to use, easiest to supervise, and the cheapest to keep tidy because nothing hides at the back.
• Shelf lockers — a shelf above the hook for hats, mitts and indoor shoes. The most common choice for preschool rooms.
• Seat lockers — a bench at the base. Worth it anywhere children put on and take off boots, which in Canada is most of the year.
• Cubby units with clear bins — ten, twenty or thirty sections. Bins pull out, go in the dishwasher, and let an educator see what's in a section without opening it.

Why these last

Cubby and locker walls take more abuse than anything else in a centre — wet boots, backpacks swung on hooks, a hundred small hands a day. Ours are built from void-free Baltic birch with cut joinery and mechanical fasteners rather than screws into a panel edge, which is where flat-pack storage fails first. Edges are rounded and sanded. Finishes are low-VOC and child-safe.

They're made in one building in Moorefield, Ontario, on our own machines. That's why we can change a dimension to fit an alcove, and why a replacement part still exists in five years. Everything carries a Limited Lifetime warranty on materials and craftsmanship.

Planning a full room? Our layout service is included with every commercial order — send us the floor plan and we'll tell you what fits. More on how and where these are built on Made in Canada, and the material and finish detail is on Materials & Safety.