I have crossed-off a few things on the to-do list, but it is amazing how sidetracked I can get...I start one thing that leads to another, that leads to the wheels in my brain to start turning, which leads me to forgetting all about the to-do list and I find myself in the car with Chris on our way to Ikea to buy an Expedit bookcase for Molly's Barbie room in the basement.
Yes, Molly has a room in the basement for the sole purpose of playing barbies...well she did. It all started about seven years ago when Shannon would play Barbies. She would spend hours decorated and setting up her houses and if the boys came into the basement, they would destroy everything in thirty seconds like a tornado. So we had this unfinished storage room in the basement that I cleared a space for Shannon to set up her houses. I bought an area rug so that she wasn't on a cold concrete floor and that is where she played, undisturbed by her brothers. Every so often, I would go into the storage room to go through stuff to make more room for Shannon and then one day I came to the realization that there was nothing in that room that we needed. Most of the stuff that we moved from our old house never was touched again. The rest of the stuff was baby clothes and paraphernalia and we were done with babies. Molly at this point was 2 or 3 years old. So I was going to repurpose this space. We didn't need all this stuff that was in this room, but we needed a space for Shannon to play away from her brothers. I went through that room one box at a time. I had piles of stuff to give away, we had a garage sale that year and sold a lot of the baby stuff, the high chair, pack n plays, saucers, bouncy seats. We got rid of it all. Once the room was empty, we had it finished and we have gotten our money's worth out of it. Once Shannon outgrew it, it became Molly's Barbie room, but slowly there are less and less Barbies. Back in January, we did a big overhaul of the room and got rid of a few of the houses that she didn't play with anymore. But the past few days, I have found myself down there once again trying to repurpose the room. This is how it started.
Our pantry in our kitchen is super small. The rest of our house is fine but I always felt the size of our pantry didn't match the rest of the house, if that makes sense. We are a family of six and one trip to Costco and our kitchen is over flowing. So I decided to rearrange the kitchen cabinets to make more room for food. This then lead me to go into the basement where we have some shelves for "overflow" food. This then lead me to the closet under the basement stairs that we made into an art room, more like an art nook because it was so small. I took one look and it was a disaster. Molly was the only one that really used that space and she was outgrowing it. So I asked her if she wanted to turn part of the Barbie room into her an art room. She was thrilled. She still plays with her American Girls dolls and her Barbies, but I know we don't have much time left with this kind of play. So that's how we ended up in the car on our way to Ikea to transform and repurpose the Barbie room into an art room.
For the past three days Molly and I have sorted through all her art supplies that were in the closet under the stairs as well as all her Barbie stuff. We repurposed her dresser from her room that we moved into the basement last month when she got her new bed with drawers underneath. The dresser now holds all her Barbie stuff and we repurposed all the baskets we already had and filled them with all her art supplies.
A little reading corner.
Timmy feeling inspired with the cleaned up room.
Molly now has a repurposed room to do her art work all for a little over $200. We bought the bookshelf, desktop and two pink chairs all from Ikea...now to transform the old art nook into an over flow pantry. A little bit of paint and a few more shelves from the Container Store and we should be good.
It amazes me how much writing they did on the white walls...
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