Room to play

The old shelves

In an effort to get our adult stuff into a storage solution that:

• holds more stuff
• holds more stuff out of sight
• takes up a lot of room
• encourage the kid to play upstairs

We picked white wardrobe units from Ikea and the saga of re-configuring the loft area began.  I packed all the items that were on the lean-to shelves from the single girl condo and moved them out.  They will flank the tv at the front of the room.  They will again hold our family photos, but now also kid toys.

The wardrobes will hold our table cloths, music, games,  and other random things including my stealthy box of Christmas gifts that I gather throughout the year.  The fact that I need a ladder to reach the top shelf gives me comfort that I can hide things from Lucy for a while.  I don't hide things from Jason, and can't shop too far in advance for him.  He's tricky.

Building the massive wardrobes was a Herculean task that required multiple trips to Ikea due to a faulty designer selection and a break-fix.  These units are 93 inches tall and 80 inches wide - they are now part of our lives permanently.  When we die, we can be stowed on the bottom shelf with room to spare.

After they were expertly assembled (I LOVE YOU JASON!), the next task was to stow all the music CDs into binders.  This allowed us to eliminate an entire bookshelf of cd's.  Sounds easy, but it was a tedious task and the desire for alphabetization was strong, but mostly the music grouped in alphabetical sections - not order.

Once that one shelf of music was moved we were able to bring one of the lean shelves back in and then start the move of the DVD library into the office.

  This 'small' project has thus far impacted the loft, the living room downstairs, the office, the guest bedroom and the closets in our bedroom and the hall.   Oh, and about 6 weekends and no less than 16 nap-work sessions.

This past Sunday, we made amazing progress and managed to move all the big furniture pieces that will be impacted.

Yesterday during my lunch break, I decided that the room needed more color and so I pulled out the wool carpet that we had been storing behind Lucy's bed and dragged it into the room.

When you see movies and some schlub rolls up a dead body into a carpet and then puts it in the back of their car to dump somewhere you should know that it is made-up bullshit.  The carpet alone is hardly manageable by one person, let alone adding the weight of a lifeless thug.    My plans of disposing of unwanted house guests in this manner are dead and require retooling.  Oooh..tools.  There's an idea.

Anywhooo.... I restocked the lean shelves with our trinkets and loaded the bottom levels with things like the lego bin, a tub of stuffed animals and when Lucy came home she ran into the room, stopped looked around and immediately understood that this was a zone to play in.  My heart soared when she grabbed the legos and the dolls and plopped herself on the floor.  

I hoped that if we got rid of the towering shelves of dvds and cd's that she knew she wasn't supposed to touch that she would feel like this was her space.  Mission accomplished.

We still have a few tasks left.  We'll be installing a wire curtain rod along the blank wall (at a safe height) to hang current art work and colorful play things and I'm still moving things around from packed drawers to the wardrobe.  We need to move some of the downstairs toys "up".

like this!

The toy kitchen will remain downstairs, but the bins of dolls and trains will come to the upper play room.   Lucy is welcome in every corner of the house (not the home office), but her toys need containment.  And if I'm too lazy to pick up everything at nights end, I don't want it in the downstairs area.

Our office actually looks more polished with the removal of the frilly Pottery Barn desk and the addition of the DVD towers, as well as the console piece that was behind our couch fits very nicely under the window and I've managed to clear out some drawers to give Jason more storage.

I'm delighted with our work.