Dining Room is repurposed into the Playroom

Since we are not going to be moving out of our 2-bedroom, 1bathroom, slab foundation,

no-storage home for at least a couple of years while we wait the market out, the Hubs and I decided to re-arrange some rooms to create spaces that will work better for our growing family.  If you have been reading this blog, you know we have three very young and energetic kids and our home, as-is, did not have much room for them to play. 

Our dining room was always a room of transition for:

1. Items going to the garage for storage

2. Items going out the door to Goodwill or Once Upon A Child

3. Items we need to bring with us somewhere

4. And lastly, items for which we have no plan!

Since the space has always been a source of frustration because we can never use it to eat dinner together or effectively use the filing cabinet or computer desk, we decided it would be best to turn it into a playroom for the kids. I found a small wall art canvas picture of a sleepy owl on a branch as inspiration for the theme. 





 

Here's how the dining room looked before: 



She's a beaut, ain't she?



NOT a fan of this chandelier or the clutter on top of the filing AND dryer in this shot



  

 
Let the Painting Begin!



You will probably notice in the picture above that there are fingerpaint marks on the wall from my spontaneous insanity episode where I helped the kids fingerpaint on the wall.  It apparently didn't wipe off as well as I thought. 



Once we finished painting, we removed the table and area rug, vacuumed the laminate floor, and laid down these:

Foam floor mats from Sam's Club - $21.86 for 8 24" x 24" mats. We used two packages and had a couple left over.

These mats are really soft and give the kids some protection for their legs and backs from the hard floor.  It also protects their noggins when they fall down and we're talking about a 9 month old and a 2-1/2 year old here....they fall A LOT.  Sam's Club had the cheapest and most immediately-available option although I didn't get to pick my colors, so they don't really go with the theme I picked out.  But, we are on a tight budget, so cheap it was!

Once the floor was laid, we brought the train table and the bucket-shelf into the room.  We are also going to be removing the Hubs' desk and filing cabinet but our closet isn't quite ready for them yet, so they are still in the playroom.  We are playing musical furniture throughout the house and I'm trying to wait until the weather turns toward Spring before I clean out the garage to make some space for some of this stuff. 

We did make a trip to IKEA yesterday and picked up some Expedit shelving units that I am seeing everywhere on the blogosphere.



http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70193745/#/10103088

We bought the unit pictured above and another two-cube shelf.  We're going to lay the bigger one on its side as a divider for the room and place the two-cube unit on top of it perpendicular to the bottom one (parallel to the wall).  I will upload photos once it's all done so it's easier to envision.  We bought some teal and white fabric drawers to store toys on these shelves.

This is as far as we got over the weekend so I will be posting about the progress as we go along.  Thanks for reading!

This is the next thing to tackle in this room - the broken spigot from 2010