playroom update!

:: This post contains affiliate links. (But not to Ikea. Unfortunately.)

All my plans for updating our playroom kind of went off the rails this spring when my mom got sick. I was away from home a lot, and when I was at home, I wasn't really in a playroom-design headspace, you know? Still, the room has evolved, with and without my assistance.

Although this room still doesn't quite feel finished or right, it's just a wee bit different from back in the day. Last February, I decided to add some bookcases to flank the piano. Then, in the middle of March, I decided to change up the paint color. In April, I built a little bookshelf dollhouse. In May, though, my mom got sick - aaand that's where I pretty much got stuck. At least, until the last few weeks.

Really, it was Rowan's birthday that got me moving again, for a couple reasons. First, the playroom is mostly designed around what she loves to play with at any given time, and that has definitely changed recently. Between outgrowing old toys and receiving new ones for her birthday, it was high time to swap out the playroom's contents. Second, what's more motivating than having a bunch of guests over, like we did for her birthday party?! I'm telling you, if you're ever in a decorating or cleaning rut, plan a house party.

In anticipation of having people over (even though I'm sure 98% of those people never noticed these changes!), I was finally able to tackle some of the playroom details that had been hanging over my head since May. I organized the shelves, finally found the right bins for the toys (from Target), added pictures to empty frames, and re-hung the wall art - all of which left the room looking as it does today.

Here's a look at the playroom before and after, going clockwise around:

It's so crazy for me to look at these comparison pictures and see how much lighter and brighter everything is! And even though I was a little worried at first that the new bookshelves made the room look too busy, they've grown on me. Plus, you can't beat them in terms of functionality. We could actually fit a lot more toys on here if we needed to; instead, we ran out of toys to store on the new shelves and had to add some fillers.

Here are some close-ups of the new bookcases:

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how it's looking these days! And, more to the point, with how it's functioning. This is Rowan's go-to room. She trashes it multiple times throughout the day, which is good - that means she's using it (or so I tell myself). The bins make it easy (for both her and me) to clean up quickly. I love that there are shelves of toys within her reach, but also shelves that are too high for her, which means I can keep fragile items (decor, CDs, etc.) safe but still in the room. Plus, it's great that there's a wide open space in the center of the room. I usually rotate some bigger toys for that area - a slide, a rocking horse, a play house - and she also just uses it for playing: building train tracks, dumping puzzles out (and occasionally putting them together), or playing doctor with a line-up of baby dolls, multiple Elsas and Annas, and her Spiderman guy.

Here's a source list of the newer items for the nosy folks (like me).

:: RUG: This is the Mohawk Candy Craze rug, which I purchased from Amazon. I'm not sure the large size is available anymore, which is too bad, because it is the perfect playroom rug. Soft, warm, colorful, and cleans up easily (but also hides any stains that might not come out!). I love it.

:: WALLS: This color (Benjamin Moore's Gray Owl) is such an improvement over the gold-toned brown from before. I did love that color, but it was just too dark for the room. Plus, between the rug and the toys on display, it's nice to have a more neutral background. It's not quite the right shade of gray for me (I prefer the gray from her nursery, Benjamin Moore's Abalone), but it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

:: BOOKCASES: All three bookcases in the room are from Ikea. The two tall ones are Billy bookcases, and the lower bookshelf is an Expedit (which is now sold as the Kallax series).

:: WALL ART: The dude on a bike is an Ikea poster in an Ikea frame, and the Emerson quote print is from Etsy, also in an Ikea frame.

As usual, I don't feel like I'm completely finished with this room. There are still some things I'd like to work on. I never added trim or moulding to the bookcases, which would make them look more finished and built in. The lamp on the low bookshelf isn't the right height. I wish the chair covers were gray instead of brown. Honestly, though, those things are way down on my list of priorities these days, so we'll see how the room evolves from here!

bookshelf dollhouse (aka, random procrastination project).

What to do when you're procrastinating on all the projects you've started and left partially finished inside AND outside of your house? How about start a totally random and unnecessary project?

Okay. Here you go:

I'm not totally ignoring my other projects. We made significant headway on two backyard tasks this weekend - the slide mound:

And the music wall:

The bad news is that we didn't have the time (or...the willpower) to finish either one. The slide mound still needs some steps in the back (hoping to easily cut them from old 2"x4"s from our wood pile) and a couple bags of mulch to hold it together, and the music wall needs a few more items nailed in (namely, the xylophone pieces, which I can't figure out how to dismantle). So they, like every other project in this house right now - the crawl space, the basement reorganization, the playroom, the Instagram display in the stairwell - are three-quarters of the way finished.

Sounds like a great time to cook up a new project, yeah?

Despite its unfinished state, Rowan's been loving the playroom. I haven't gotten around to organizing her toys on the new bookshelves, but I did shove a bunch of her stuff on random shelves, mostly to get it off the floor.

And it turns out that her new favorite place to play in this room is on the second shelf from the bottom of each bookshelf. She's constantly taking little cars, trucks, and people figures and zooming them around those two surfaces. They're the perfect height for her to play on.

I was showing my sister the playroom updates earlier this week and explaining how Rowan loves those two shelves when I trailed off mid-sentence, staring. Totally random flash of inspiration: What if I turned a shelf into a little dollhouse? I bet Rowan would have so much fun with that!

That night, I hunted around Pinterest for dollhouse ideas and did my best not to get sidetracked by elaborate DIY mini-mansions with working electrical circuits. Rowan's only one and a half, after all. She doesn't need a super-fancy setup at this point. In fact, she has a perfectly fine Fisher-Price dollhouse (you can see it in the picture above - bottom shelf on the right)...but I still thought it would be cool to make her a custom one.

And?

Ta-da!

I went to Michael's last night (with J.J....during our date night...so romantic for him) and picked out some cheap "wallpaper" for the house. Today during Rowan's nap (and while she was at Gramma's in the late afternoon), I measured and cut out a few pieces of cardboard and slotted them together, creating four "rooms"...

(You can see I added an extra piece of cardboard on each side for support.)

...and then labeled the pieces with room names (bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, outside), and removed them so I could put up wallpaper and lay carpeting (with double-sided tape).

Then I cut out some doors and used a whole mess of regular tape to reinforce everything (probably should've used glue, but I hate glue and didn't have non-wood-glue handy). I added "wallpaper" directly to the insides of the bookshelf where there wasn't any cardboard, and "carpeting" for the two bottom rooms directly to the top part of that bottom shelf, again using double-sided tape.

And that was that! Instant bookshelf dollhouse!

In this case, of course, "instant" means during date night, during naptime, during a playdate at Gramma's, and during a tornado warning when I probably should have been in the basement. Still, it only took a couple hours total, and I think she's going to dig it.

I added what little dollhouse furniture and figures we have, with the plan to purchase an inexpensive set that I found online - catch being that you have to assemble it yourself. But for ten bucks, it should be worth it. After all, we need some dressers and toilets up in here.

Bedroom on top, kitchen on bottom

Bathroom on top, backyard on bottom (with GRASS-DESIGN PAPER!)

And then I added some LED tealights for funsies. Yeah, no,
I'm wondering when I turned into this person, too.

Maybe the dollhouse will distract people from the rest of the playroom that I'm ignoring - the weird gap between the tops of the bookshelves and the ceiling, the fact that the gray I chose for the walls is so light it sometimes looks white, the blank walls where I've been too lazy to re-hang art, the empty shelves (or shelves crammed with random toys)...WHO CARES COME TURN ON THE PRETEND FIRE IN THE DOLLHOUSE BACKYARD! WEEEEEE!!

Ahem. Probably working on the boring basement this weekend, with all the new spiders that I'm sure have hatched since the weather started warming up. Or maybe I'll just build dollhouse furniture and ignore everything else, including life-threatening weather warnings. #priorities

whoa-oh, domino.

I'm feeling a major domino effect in my house lately, where one project sets in motion a series of other projects. We started out by encapsulating the crawl space, which led to reorganizing the whole basement, which led to selling hundreds of dollars' worth of stuff from the basement, which led to buying new bookcases for the playroom, which led to painting the playroom, which led to reorganizing the playroom...and not one of those tasks - not one - is 100% complete right now. Also, the weather is breaking, which means I'm being seduced by sunshine and warm(er) air to just abandon all the half-finished indoor projects and work on outside projects instead. 

(Made J.J. rescue a wavy slide from a curbside trash pile last night so we can make this, oh yes I did.) (And spent yesterday afternoon at the thrift store, scouting out items for our outdoor music wall.)

But! I made good on my promise to finish building (and anchoring) the bookcases in the playroom:

Here are some shots of the other side of the room (the new gray paint is more evident in person - I think the sunlight is washing it out in these pictures):

I definitely want to add crown moulding to the bookcases, and to add a little trim to close the gap between the bookcases and the side walls. The gap is there because there's a return vent in one corner that one of the bookcases butts up against, so I mirrored it on other side of the room as well. But I finished building them! Even in spite of Ikea pulling an Ikea and giving me a wrong piece for the bookcase height extender:

That is most assuredly not a sixth screw-thingy.

For the time being, though, I'm leaving the bookcases alone and trying to focus on finding some storage bins (I just tossed all of Rowan's toys on the shelves for now), and figuring out where to position the rest of the furniture - namely, the third (and original) bookcase:

I think we're pretty set on keeping this brown EXPEDIT instead of replacing it with the new white one (which means the white one will go in the basement, in place of the Crumbling Workbench of Imminent Death), but I'm still not sure where to put it. It doesn't look perfect anywhere, and anytime I put it somewhere, a subset of dominoes starts to fall: I'm reminded that I also don't know where to hang any of the art now, and that the floor lamps don't have homes that make sense now, and why do I have so many pillows in this room, and where are we going to hang my guitars, and maybe I should paint the backs of the bookcases, and why don't my records fit on those shelves and where should I put them instead and...

Yeahhh.

And then there are the dominoes that I'm ignoring right now - the ones set off by the basement and playroom updates. Dominoes like the colors of the playroom blinds and the stairwell walls, which now clash with the gray of the playroom; and the halfhearted curtain system I sort of started across the crawl space opening; and the pile of stuff in the basement (and the garage, now that I think about it) that needs to move into our already-full outdoor shed...and...and...and...

I feel like there's a moral here somewhere. Downsize? Purge? Ignore? Probably. Or option D - all of the above, which shakes out as: ride out the domino train and see where it takes me. 

Which is probably back to Ikea for Moar Krap. Or outside to build a slide mound.

file under: phrases of shivery death.

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I once wrote a whole blog post about my YES words and NO words. I'll wait a minute while you go read it, and then another minute while you shake your head slowly and say, "Duuuuude." (There's a reason I prefaced those lists with the descriptor "idiosyncratic and weird-ass glory.")

Well, it turns out that there can be YES and NO phrases, too - including one that I run across all. the. time, and am about to use. Repeatedly.

POP OF COLOR.

There. I said it. Pop of color. I've said it lots of times before, actually, because I looove pops of color in decorating. I just hate the phrase so much that I almost didn't want to write about the playroom progress, because the next stage is, inevitably, incorporating pops of color.

As you can see, painting status is: done! I spent the last week or so painting in chunks of an hour here, a couple hours there. It's the longest I've ever taken to paint a room - although, to be fair, it's kind of two rooms: the entryway (small area, but intricate brush work) and the playroom itself (large area, lots of cutting in, but then slapping the majority of the paint on with a big ol' roller). It helped that (a) J.J. had a few days off work last week, so he could be with Rowan while I painted, and (b) I skipped a lot of my usual painting steps. I didn't prime, which meant only two coats total instead of three; and instead of emptying out the whole room, I just moved furniture away from whatever wall I was working on. Oh! It was also much easier to follow the sharp lines made by our pro painter than to create new ones to hide the mistakes of the previous owners' paint jobs, and gray is a lot more forgiving than, say, bright freakin' yellow, if you happen to end up with a wobbly paint line here and there.

Speaking of gray - I changed my mind about the shade of gray I wanted after remembering how the color in Rowan's room (Benjamin Moore's Abalone) looks lavender sometimes. That's fine in a small bedroom, but I wasn't sure how I'd like that in a main room. Kind of on a whim, I went with Benjamin Moore's Gray Owl (color-matched to zero-VOC Valspar paint from Lowe's). I like it - a lot - but it's a little lighter than I wanted, and a little bluer. Hoping it looks more right after the room is put back together. And for the record? It takes EXACTLY ONE GALLON to paint the entryway and playroom. Like, you will be squeeeeezing every drop out of that roller to cover the last few square feet of wall, and nope, you won't have any left over for touch-ups down the road. Exactly one gallon.

Anyway! Now that the painting is done, it's time for...BILLY!

Grainy pics courtesy of dim evening light. Sorry 'bout it.

I picked up two Billy bookcases and a white Not-Expedit (I can't remember what they changed the name of the old Expedit bookcases to) from Ikea this past weekend, all with Craigslist cash from basement junk. (Still need to update you on the basement, too!) The bookcases are the easiest things I've ever assembled from Ikea...took about a half hour each.

But. Right now?

Everything has slowed to a halt. See, I thought it would look great to incorporate a (...wait for it...) pop of color by painting the backs of the Billys. Actually, if I'm totally honest, one of the things that motivated me to paint the playroom gray was that I wanted the pop of color in the bookcases to look great, and nothing was really jiving with the brown when I pictured it in my head. With the gray, though, the options are endless.

I wanted to pull something from the playroom rug, which led me to purple initially - like a deep violet. It's unique and unexpected. But I'm not changing out the record-frame installation I already have over the piano, and I think purple might clash with the orangey-red. UNLESS IT'S THE RIGHT SHADE OF PURPLE?! I don't know. My other thought was to go with a deep peacock blue, which makes total sense - there's already a turquoise/peacock theme going on in there:

My main detractor is that I use blue everywherrrrre in my house. Everywhere. Seriously:

HERE

THERE

EVERYWHERE

So, on the one hand, blue might be overdone in my house. On the other hand, it makes it easier to swap out pillows, art, and decor from one room to the other. And on the other other hand, I love blue. It's my favorite color. And that bright, light turquoise shade I have everywhere is, like, my spirit color. (FYI, wanton use of the phrase "spirit animal" jettisons it right to the top of my NO phrase list.)

I decided to go ahead and build the Billys to see how they looked in the playroom, and then choose a color for the backings. Good thing I did...because I think I totally changed my mind about the method of popping in some color. My friend Bethy (a legit artist and graphic designer) threw a surprise alternative into the mix: bins as the pop of color. Picture me running into the playroom, staring at the bookcases, and slapping my forehead. YES! Duh! Bins as the pop of color! The whole point of the bookcases is to add extra storage, primarily for toys, which means we'll need something to corral them. We've been using brown fabric bins from Target so far...

...and it makes perfect sense to swap those out for some colorful ones and call it a day. And if the bins don't make the right impact, my mother-in-law had the perfect solution - covering cardboard cut-outs with fabric, paint, or wallpaper and just inserting them in the backs of the bookcases. Great! Lots of options, all of which can be decided on at a later point.

But.

I can't. Get motivated. To finish. ANYTHING.

After a few weeks of chipping away at basement tasks once the crawl space was encapsulated, I powered through a week of painting, cleaning, and assembling in the playroom. Aaand then I took a day off from house updates because I literally didn't have ten minutes to spare throughout that day or night. And now? I'm stuck. I still need to:

• Anchor the Billys to the wall (ASAP, because right now Rowan isn't allowed anywhere near them, since they're huge tipping hazards) - I was waiting to anchor them in case I wanted to paint the backs (nixed) or cut out holes to expose the outlets behind the bookcases (also nixed, I think)...and because I have a pathological aversion to searching for wall studs (yes, even with a stud finder)
• Add height extenders to the bookcases, which will bring them almost to the ceiling...unless I decide to do a display shelf all the way across the wall?!
• Figure out what, if anything, I'll do to make the Billys look more built in (add base trim, add trim to close the gap between the bookcases and the wall, add crown moulding)
• Re-hang the artwork and guitars in the playroom, although I can't figure out where any of that's going to go quite yet
• Assemble the new white Not-Expedit and decide whether it's going in the playroom (to replace the current brown Expedit) or the basement (to replace the current rotting work bench, which needs to be deconstructed and disposed of)
• Hang curtains of some sort in the basement to close off the crawl space view
• Oh, yeah, and figure out a hanging solution for those Instagram pics in the stairwell!

This is always the most annoying part of house updates - the middle. All your stuff is shoved in corners and on beds and in boxes, just waiting to be re-homed; there are random paintbrushes and screwdrivers still lurking on shelves; you used up all your excitement getting the first phase of the project done, and it turns out that was the easy phase; and every time you walk into the room to finish up, seriously for real this time, you get overwhelmed by how much still has to be done. So you meander away, probably to curl up somewhere soft and warm and stocked with Cadbury Eggs.

With that said: I hereby promise to complete Step One of Phase Two (build the height extenders & anchor the Billys) the next time I can hammer without waking up any babies. Friday? Maybe? Hopefully? I bet it'll help if I ignore the pop of color issue for now...and check out my playroom Pinterest board and remember why in the world I started this project, anyway. That, and eat more Cadbury Eggs. FOR ENERGY, guys. Obviously.

oops, I did it again.

I was daydreaming about potential Billy bookcases in the playroom again today, since I've officially sold enough junk from the basement to buy new ones from Ikea, and I kept getting tripped up on something as I re-read my post about the room.

Can you guess what it is?

How about now? Seeing it yet?

This picture will DEFINITELY give it away...

It's the paint color. 

THE PAINT COLOR.

Paint is supposed to be such an easy thing to switch out in a room, but ughhh, the thought of taking everything off the walls...and moving the rug and the furniture...and cutting in around the windows and the doorframes and the staircase...blechhh. So not my cup of tea these days, especially since a certain member of my household is wont to running into walls, wet paint or not.

But I can't ignore that hue anymore. I really liked it at first (obviously, considering I...chose it), but I'm not feeling it these days. I don't like the way it plays with everything else in the room, and the shade is too dark, too moody, and too reminiscent of grody stuff...like mud. Or poop.

So I kept staring at those pictures on my computer and decided to go take a look around the room. JUST a look. A look never hurt anyone, right?

And?

Hmm...those blinds aren't as hard to remove as I thought they were. That part of painting the room wouldn't be so bad. And...oh...look how the room just divides itself into convenient little chunks that could be tackled during naptime! Huh. And...you know...I don't think I'd have to prime, since the room was professionally painted just a few years ago. And...hey...I really do love the color of Rowan's bedroom --

-- and the leftover paint from her bedroom is in a handy little mason jar down in the basement --

-- and...okay. Maybe a few test patches happened.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

J.J. is home from work today, but he was out on a run when the testing happened. There are four large-ish patches. He's been back from his run for a half hour and hasn't noticed them yet. That's probably good, since he's likely to try talking me out of it. J.J. is kind of against painting this room, which I get:

1. I am unbearable when I'm trying to choose a paint color. Eleventy jillion test patches, none of which is The Right and Perfect Shade, and then I ask him for his opinion, which is always wrong, even if he chooses the one I was favoring. Yeah. I know. It's not my best quality.
2. I do the painting myself (because control freak), but he has to help with some furniture moving, which is never fun, especially after you've been at an emotionally-draining job all day and then run the toddler-bedtime gauntlet and just want to SIT for two seconds.
3. Having a room in your house being painted - especially the primary room where your toddler hangs out - is generally a giant pain in the ass. 

The wheels are in motion, though. I think it's going to happen. I mean - one of the hardest steps (choosing a paint color) is already taken care of! Gray is SUCH a hard color to nail, but I adore the color I chose for Rowan's room (Benjamin Moore's Abalone). And, come on, why go through the trouble of making over a room (in our case, with the new bookcases) if you're only going to half-ass it, right?

RIGHT?

Off to see what J.J. thinks of my plan. (And to scheme about paint colors for the bookcase backings, which will look ten times more awesome in a GRAY room!!)

evolution of a playroom.

You know how first impressions are supposed to be so important? Let me tell you how that shook out in terms of our house. We first saw it right after we'd be burned by a seller who rejected our offer on what we thought was The Perfect House. I wasn't ready to love again, and our Realtor's warning before we went to check this house out ("Just...try to ignore the decor") didn't really help. Nor did the salmon-pink exterior siding, the overgrown lawn...or the green carpeting and Little House on the Prairie drapes in the very first room we saw:

Nice shorts there, Cath.

First terrible impressions aside, the layout of the house and the awesome back yard (plus the affordable price tag...thank you, real estate bubble) won us over. We took the plunge and bought the house, despite its decor - and despite my adamance that we were NOT fixer-uppers and NOT DIYers. We moved in in the summer of 2009, and we spent our first night in the house starting the evolution of the front room by tearing up that green carpeting, which also snaked its way up the stairs and down the upstairs hallway.

Miraculously, the floors were in fantastic shape underneath that dingy, smelly carpet.

That was the last action the front room saw until winter, when we hired professionals to drywall over the textured-tile ceiling and paint the room brown:

Should've just left it like this. Especially that wall by the stairs.
(Beige is a hard color to pick, all right?)

Now the bones were looking significantly better - hardwood floors touched up, old-fashioned drapes removed, ceiling redone, and walls painted - but it stayed pretty empty for a while, with just an old couch and bureau shoved in there. Two years later, when we had saved up enough to afford some furniture, we Ikea'd up the joint. We also got married a year after we moved, which meant we were lucky enough to be gifted with new accessories, a new handmade side table, and a new-to-us piano for the room.

BUT. I have to be honest. While it was great that the room was evolving - we added some lighting, strung some paper lanterns in the window well, and arranged the framed album covers above the piano - it wasn't where we usually went to hang out. That changed once Rowan came along, mostly because it became her playroom. 

Here's how it looks these days (moving around the room clockwise):

(Took this pic during naptime, and you can see how Rowan gathers all her baby

dolls on the ottoman and covers them up with a blanket to put them "nigh-nigh"...ha!)

There's decent storage space (the Ikea EXPEDIT bookshelf, the storage ottomans, the...floor), but it's still just off. We don't have anywhere except the top of the bookshelf and the top of the piano to put things out of Rowan's reach, which makes it difficult to store my records, tapes, and CDs, and we've already run out of cubbies for her toys. I want to rejigger the wall art. I keep meaning to bring back the old bench for underneath the window (you can see it in the first picture; it's outside right now) and fix it up, paint it, and give it a pretty pillow cover. Also? I kind of hate the brown walls lately. Would LOVE to paint them a light gray (or, truly, a light, bright blue - but that isn't happening unless the blue kitchen gets repainted, too, soooo...). Changing the wall color in the playroom requires repainting the entryway as well, though, so I'm going to have to get a lot more motivated to make that happen. All in all, boohoo to all my first-world problems, the summation of which is: The room is functional, but not what I want it to be. And not what it COULD be.

In the meantime, I was cruising Pinterest yesterday and got COMPLETELY inspired by this picture:

from here

So bright, so airy, so cheery - and the angle totally reminded me of our playroom, with that big window on the one wall. The bookshelves on the right-side wall were what especially struck me. In a flash, I envisioned bookshelves flanking our piano, made to look like built-ins, and maybe even connected across the tops with a single display shelf. Actually, once upon a time I imagined doing "built-ins" on the window wall, connected in the middle by a storage bench to create a little reading nook under the window. That never panned out, though, because of two things: the way the window well is recessed, and the fact that I thought bookshelves would look out of place on that specific wall. Oh, and also because there's a vent in the floor under the window, and that detail kept tripping me up when I tried to brainstorm window-storage-bench ideas. This wall, though? The piano wall? Oh, I can just see the bookshelves now:

We have two bookshelves in the family room that would pretty much fit the bill for this project, but (1) I like them and use them where they are, and (2) there are approximately seventy trillion tutorials on Pinterest for doing this project with Ikea BILLY bookshelves, which are relatively cheap. For now, I'm trolling Craigslist to see if any pop up, since they're so popular - but if I don't find any soon, I might just sell a few more things from the basement's Growing Pile of Doom and go ahead and buy new BILLYs. ...And then paint the interiors a fun color, and then style the upper shelves, and then dream up a fun photo project for the upper display shelf, and and and...yessss! Man, I've missed dreaming up new room ideas. Definitely wish my favorite hobby weren't so expensive! But I really think I can make this work within an itty-bitty budget, and I'm excited to figure out this next stage of the playroom's evolution.

(Apologies in advance to my husband, who will no doubt suffer as a result of my "super easy and cheap and awesome" built-in bookcase scheme. Smooches to you, J.J.)