We spent the past few weeks turning our messy, college-style office loft into a playroom slash office with a more modern feel.
Here's what it looked like before:
A mess right? Man, it stressed me out. Constant source of stress and complaint as I really dislike clutter!
All of our furniture spent a couple weeks in boxes in our dining room. Both mommy. Kyle, and Sequoia were troopers during this cluttery time!
It wasn't as simple as new furniture and paint, however. Our loft was never even wired for a light let alone a ceiling fan. Dave, the oh-so-electrically-inclined decided to tackle the attic himself. He crawled in from outside Kyle's nursery and sawed, drilled, and sweat his way through to the ceiling of our loft. I'm pretty lucky to have married such a handy-man... and one so willing to tackle scary electrical work like this! After the fun afternoon of electrical work was done and the fan was installed, we spent 2 work nights painting. After Kyle went to bed each night, we grabbed rollers and worked until the wee hours taping and painting. We really wanted to get the room reasonably in shape before we had company that Friday.
Dave spent the following two work nights assembling tons and tons of furniture. IKEA has simple modern furniture at a very reasonable cost, but they leave ALL of the assembly to you.
Once the furniture was installed, I spent the next week decorating. Between my mom and I, we cleared out 6 Targets of their Itso bins as they had been clearanced. They are the perfect size bins for the cubbies and are surprisingly durable to heavy toys, tugging, and even being used as a standing mechanism. ;)
I added stars to the ceramic vases, filled the glass vases with red, black and white sand, and gave the room a family feel with tons of pictures.
I modge-podged rocket paper on the doors of his cubbies and hand-painting rocket countdown canvases to give the playroom side of the loft a more kid feel. I think the rocket paintings turned out really well even if they took an enormous amount of time. Not bad for a nerdy engineer type!
There are a total of 60 cubbies so it gives us TONS of room to hide toys and such going forward. I am sure, however, that this is the cleanest it'll ever look. Kyle has figured out how to pull out the bins and open the cubby doors, so it only takes a handful of minutes before the loft is covered with toys.
Dave and I both sacrificed work area space so that Kyle could have more room to play with his toys, but we feel it's a great compromise for us to get to spend more time as a family together.
And seriously, it's not like we wanted to give up this view for an office in the basement!
