Dablet's Playroom - Phase One

The design, and redesign, of Dablet's playroom has been the center of attention around here for quite a while! When we sold our printing company early this year, we moved a large chunk of equipment and paper back to the house that quickly took up our formal dining room. I always knew that we would never use our formal dining room because we have a large open concept eat-in kitchen...but I did not expect it to turn into a storage room! It was especially disturbing to have it become storage because its one of our two front rooms when you first walk into the house...bad impression?! I think so!
This is what we had for a while as an eye sore while we tried to shift things around, purge, and clear out the room:

This is what can happen to your life quickly!

Clearly, that's not what anyone wants to live with! Once Dablet was interacting with everything around her in a much more hands on and mobile way (crawling too!), it because obvious that this room needed to be a playroom! We cleared it out and painted the "builders beige" walls with Benjamin Moore's Gray Owl (one of my FAVORITE grays!) and immediately the room looked better! 

We found a fabulous chair from IKEA that was supposed to have legs on it, but we never screwed them in!

Find this chair online here

It was the perfect height off the ground for Dablet to be able to safely climb in and out on her own. I'm contemplating getting a second one of these chairs for her in our family room and making a fun bright slipcover for this one! She clearly loves it!

Kids and tags!!!

This Solsta Olarp Chair was the perfect reading chair for her reading nook! I brought down a bookcase I was originally going to use in my new office because the teal popped so well against the gray! Once (some of) her books were on the shelves it brought SO much color into the room! That's one of the things I love about the gray backdrop; it's a perfect canvas for all kinds of colors. It's essential to have lots of color in a child's space:

I found this piece at HomeGoods!

Because the opposite corner in the room is going to be her crafty area, we decided to put her main toy storage on the same wall as her reading nook. Of course the most important part to any playroom (aside from the color!) is the functionality. Toy storage has to be more than just easy for me to quickly return order to the room, Dablet needs to be able to use it herself! Safely too!

Again we went to IKEA for this one! The Trofast Toy Storage series is PERFECT for allowing you to get what you need based on what you have to store! Different colors, and bucket depths (all mounted on easy sliding brackets) make a custom look possible!

Added bouns, Dablet has NO problem emptying everything out herself, and I have no problem quickly putting things back together!

Her foam ABC, 123 mat will soon be replaced by a rug, but the pop of color has been welcome!

So far I have this wall done, with the opposite wall "under construction"! The artwork that Nicole ap! created for us is being framed and I cannot wait to finish off the look! Dablet is accepting appointments to come check out her playroom, as long as you don't mind getting on the ground and enjoying it with her! This project has allowed me to think like a kid again, and lay to rest thee stigma against having playrooms as soon as you walk into someone's house. Maybe you'll disagree with me, but when this look is done I am confident it will be a nice sight to walk in the door to!