Sunday, January 11, 2009

What a difference a day makes!







As I mentioned yesterday, we are changing our spare bedroom from a guestroom to a playroom for the kids. Now I should clarify that the "guest room" was really a junk room with a bed and dresser buried somewhere underneath our layers of ---say it with me--STUFF. We frantically cleared it out every time we had guests, only to throw everything back in when they left. Time for that to stop! Now that our furniture is happily serving its intended purpose in someone else's real guest room, its time to deal with our piles of stuff and make the room functional. WITHOUT BUYING ANYTHING. To furnish the room, I pilfered shelves from the kids rooms and used the bins they already had, which made sense since I was moving their toys into this room anyway. I then went thru the bedroom decor that I bought when Pier 1 Kids went out of business. (Got an amazing deal BTW!) I'm saving it for my son's "big boy" room, but since we still have a while until he's ready, I used those things to give the room a theme and a color scheme. I managed to get a cute airplane poster on Freecycle, and reposessed a frame for it from the attic off an old poster from my first-apartment days. (why did I still have that??) I found some old cabinets we had taken down from the laundry room when we redid it, and cleaned them up to use as sort of a window seat area, with storage for games underneath. So we have a start on a fun room! There is more to do. We have a huge white board in the garage that I plan to hang at kid level on one wall to appease thier artistic urges. I want to set up a reading area with their bean bag chairs, but the chairs are flat as pancakes. Luckily, someone posted a ton of styrofoam peanuts on Freecycle and I have arranged to pick them up tomorrow, which will hopefully bring the bean bags back to life. And we need a table and chairs for their puzzles, games and etc for the other wall. I'm sure I'll figure someting out! And I still need to clean all the STUFF out of the closet and better organize their toys. But hey, its a great start and now its a room we can actually use!! For FREE!


Other breakthrough events today:

The ironing board you see in the picture has been stuck in the "open" position for months. We had been planning to get rid of it and get a new one for who knows how long but now we need to make do. My ever so patient and loving husband hammered and pulled on it (I think I may have heard something to the effect of "why the @#$& did we decide to do this, anyway) and finally fixed it. I found, under our piles of STUFF, an new cover that I bought for it who knows how long ago. So we replaced the cover, folded it up, and that's that. And my beloved is actually glad now that he did it. In fact, he was so pleased with his progress on the ironing board that he got online to see if he could find out how to fix the lamp you see turned over in the "before" picture. It is a touch lamp, which unfortunately got stuck in the "off" position when the touch function stopped working. Well, he did some tinkering and its not perfect, but it is now stuck in the "on" position. So we can put it back where it was and it will still serve its purpose. He plans to install a switch so that we don't have to plug and unplug it to turn it on and off. So that's a second thing that would surely have been in the trash if we'd gotten around to it a month ago, and I'm realizing that we did way more of that than I thought.


5 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, I just stumbled across your blog and I have to tell you, I love the concept! I come from two "hoarder" parents and now have a less is more approach to stuff because I know how easy it is to get buried.

Anonymous said...

I love your playroom. I've been reading your blog too and find it very inspiring. I'm on the Mommysavers Forget the Joneses project, and the spending freeze is making us shop in our home for things. It's amazing how much stuff you have in your own house that you didn't know about!

Anonymous said...

Just thought I'd leave a note telling you I've enjoyed reading through your posts so far. I've bookmarked your site and look forward to reading more.

Paige said...

Your play room looks fantastic!

2simplify said...

Thanks for you comments! :)