Industrial Restoration Hardware Playroom

One of the things that made us fall in love with our house was the large open basement!! We loved that it was a huge open space for the kids to play and run around. When we moved in, I went to work to make it a fun playroom for our son, with lots of bright primary colors. See the before!!!!  While it was a great design for kids, trying to sell your house, maybe not so much??

So I give you my industrial playroom, inspired by everything Restoration Hardware!

I repainted our table and chairs white and black! The table top is technically chalk board paint, but I have not let the kids in on this secret! More on the toy storage in a bit! I painted my book ledges gray! And added some large initials of the kids with an awesome star I found at Pottery Barn Kids. Also I added my "when you wish upon a star" artwork!

One of the first things I did, and you might notice in the before is paint some walls!!! The wall to the left in the below picture used to be a red chalk board wall. Once coat of primer and one coat of the wall color, I had a nice and boring (white) wall! The wall to the right, used to be an adorable house wall I painted, but now its a nice and solid black chalk wall (so we still have some fun here!!!)

 Do you not love the red firetruck in the above picture? It completes the room!

I attempted to make some DIY Industrial shelves using pipes! While they are not exactly what I wanted them to look like, they did the trick and I am very proud I tackled this project!!! I broke my ankle (un-related to this project) mid-project, so I never really got any pictures of the during, even though the during was a big process!

These shelves are the perfect perfect size for a car garage for my sons many many big trucks!!!

 Some industrial accessories! The boat was a win at a White Elephant party one year and my son loves this boat.... so it might be here to stay!!!

 I made a matching taller industrial pipe shelf for the non-playroom portion of the room. This side is supposed to be the adult side with the TV and seating area.... though toys ALWAYS find their way over to this side!

 I made all of the below artwork! I love making state nail air! So easy but such a fabulous look!!

 More of the massive firetruck and chalk wall as seen from the "adult" side!

 I would have redo this shelf if I had not broken my ankle. The top and bottom shelf have too much space between the shelves. These were a real learning process and they were so SO expensive to make!!!!

And a wide shot from the back of the room! This room sure is a huge improvement over the mess it was before!!! 

Thanks again to First Moments Photography for these pictures!

Blue and Orange Organized Science Playroom

When we originally bought this house, I struggled and I mean struggled with the front room of our house. It is the first room you see when you enter the house and it is directly attached to the family room. And we really didn't use it for the first year and a half we lived in our house. I blogged about this room in Fall of 2012 and you can see the before of this room we a pretty blank slate. 

Rewind a minute, when we moved into our house I decided that we would have a toy box in the family room and the rest of the toys would be in the basement. At the time my son was a little over a year and din't have all that many toys..... well fast forward 4 years and with a 5 year old boy and a 2 year old girl, my kids have WAY WAY WAY too many toys. Needless to say, the toys and kids have taken over the house..... So my naive thought on only having toys in the basement soon changed and over time, I am not sure how or when, but that front room slowly because a play room. About a year ago or so I finally embraced the fact that this room was indeed a play room and my life became much easier!  

So I give you our first floor play room, I wanted a somewhat simple and not so kid looking playroom, that is still fun for the kids! Since this is the first room when walking into the house, I didn't want it to scream playroom and I think I achieved that. 

A while back we got a new sectional for our family room, so I was able to move our little sofa into the play room, which is so nice to have in a playroom. The "coffee table" is actually our train table. This room has no over head lighting, so I added some fun orange hanging pendants and I started a globe collection! Simple Etsy artwork of constellations really complete the look of the room!

When you turn the corner into the play room is where you see the toys!

A play kitchen and some more shelves with bins easily hide the mess!

I love this view! I love the planets, since we made them, and I love the colors on my periodic table. I searched for a long time for the perfect periodic table and ended up finding this one from the Land of Nod. I love the colors with the pop of orange!

Some more Etsy artwork!

Do you not love these hanging lamps? I love the pop of orange! And of course my globe collection. One globe we "borrowed" from my parents, another from my husbands parents, one my sister gave us and the 4th was from Target.

This shelf and the matching self on the other side of the couch hide so many of their toys. A ton!

I knew I wanted to find some sort of science artwork for the room since I already had the periodic table and the plants, so I searched for a while and was finally really happy when I found these great prints on Etsy!

Don't you just want to grab a toy and play?? And yes, our toy room ALWAYS looks like this!! I have my kids so well trained they put their toys away immediately.... (ok, maybe we are still working on this....)

This orange gear was a great find from Pottery Barn Kids! I love it!

My son and I had a great time painting and hanging the planets. We used a simple kit I found on Amazon and these are my absolute favorite part of this room!!

So it took a while but I am finally very happy with this room. What have you done to embrace the toys in your life?

Child's Closet Organizer

I think it's 100% accurate to say I am in the nesting phase of my pregnancy! I have been cleaning and organizing like crazy!!! And driving my husband nuts at the same time for all of the organization I have him help me with! (I cleaned our refrigerator on New Years Day, that's normal right???) 

One of my many recent organizational projects was Little Man's new Big Boy closet. If you remember I turned my craft room into Little Man's Big Boy room.

This is what his closet used to look like:

While it worked well for a craft room I didn't love it for a child's room. Our bedrooms aren't the largest so I also didn't want to take up valuable playing space for a dresser, so I wanted drawers in his closet. I also wanted a lot of shelf space! And I got it all!!!

I am SO in love with his new closet! I love that we can reconfigure it when he gets a little older and his clothes get longer. He can reach the two bottom hanging racks which is fun for him to pick out his shirts! The bottom two drawers are good for him, but the top two are a bit tall for him. 

The best part is that a lot of the bins are still empty!! I love these bins from Land of Nod!

I also created some storage boxes myself. These are old wipe boxes from Costo that I pained in gray chalkboard paint and sewed liners out of curtains. They were a lot of work but I am very happy with how these bins turned out!

In case anyone is interested the organizer itself is Martha Stewart's from Home Depot.

Linked up at: DOG DAYS OF WINTER “ORGANIZE IT” LINKY PARTY

DIY Train Table

For Christmas Little Man got a homemade train table made by grandpa. My dad made Little Man this train table based on the directions from Ana White. I know he made a few tweaks, but I don't know what they were.... I made the mistake of letting Little Man play with the table before it was painted and I was not sure how I would ever be able to get the time to paint it without disrupting play time.... but I found the time! And Little Man was even more excited to get back his table!!

The pouf I made for the table works great! The navy bins my mom purchased from Pottery Barn Kids. My dad was going to make the wooden bins, but my mom found these on sale so we just got them instead.

I love the knock off of this table and Little Man loves LOVES LOVES the train table "ba pa" made him!

Cheap toy storage

Like so many people with children, our house is overrun with toys - and we only have one little man... Last week while at Target I ran across these great canvas totes on wheels and knew these would be a great addition to our playroom. They are great because they are large and hold a decent amount of toys and I like that they are on wheels! I am sure Little Man will love that too, and will push them around... Target has two sizes of these canvases. The smaller was $15 and the larger were only $5 more, so I went for the larger size - more toy storage!!

I like any DIYer had to personalize these nice canvas totes! I used my Silhouette to make a stencil and some fabric paint and a short dry time we have a happy momma with a slightly cleaner playroom -- for now....