Hello! It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted, but I’ve been pretty busy with preparing for the holidays. We also have a birthday on New Year’s Day, so that makes things even more hectic. I have been wanting to share the pictures of our playroom, but just haven’t gotten the chance to sit down and write.
We moved into our house a little over a year ago and I haven’t really decorated much other than the baby’s room (which I’ll share later) and our play area in the basement. I was excited about this house, not only for the beautiful kitchen, hardwood floors and the four bedrooms, but for the great space in the basement for the kids to play.
I got my inspiration from this blog post I found on Pinterest: http://www.soyouthinkyourecrafty.com/pvc-challenge-season-16-week-8/ It’s a wonderful store/market set-up that she made using PVC pipe. I thought it was adorable (and just the sort of thing I would have LOVED as a kid), so I wanted to recreate it for my kids.
I got the canopy at IKEA, along with the 2×2 Expedit book case and two of the floating shelves and brackets to put the cash register on. I also bought a small lamp to put under the canopy, because it got quite dark. I put our play kitchen behind the “counter,” so our kids could play restaurant. I also made a chalk board (also with inspiration from Pinterest here: http://nicandkate09.blogspot.com/2011/08/alphabet-board.html). Instead of just putting the pan up on the wall, I thought it would be cool to paint it with chalkboard paint.
I saw several posts on Pinterest that used these spice racks from IKEA as book shelves. I thought it would be fun to include a little reading area in their playroom, but I didn’t want it to take up much space, so these worked perfectly. They were about $3 each. I also bought the unfinished wood letters from JoAnn’s. They were about $.30 each, so this project was really inexpensive. I painted the letters to match the colors in the canopy. I attached them to the wall with command strips, just in case I decide to move them or want to put a different word up. I was originally planning to just put “READ” up, but I saw the stars and swirls and thought they were fun and whimsical, so I grabbed a couple of those as well.
For other decorative elements in our playroom, I covered cork trivets from IKEA (love that place, as you can probably tell by now!) with batting and coordinating fabric. Another inspiration from Pinterest, but I added the batting, I thought it would look nicer. I like how they turned out. They were SO easy to do. I also found some old magazine ads at an antique store and put them in frames for the other wall in the playroom. I thought that would go nicely with the “store” theme.
I hope you like our play room! I’m pretty proud of it and our son loves it. I hope our daughter will too, when she’s bigger!
I Talk of Dreams 