Thrifting finds for the Playroom

The playroom is still (very much) a work in progress, but it is starting to come together…

I have put very little money into this room, which is awesome. That’s thanks, in part, to some pretty lucky thrifting finds…

I scored that little kid-sized table at Goodwill for less than a latte. Yep! Just a little bit of sanding, primer and paint…

And she was good to go…

I’m still on the hunt for two or three kid-sized chairs to go with it. I’m determined to find wooden ones for cheap… and I’m willing to wait! Which is fine as Kenton is still a bit young to actually sit at the table and do something productive.

We painted the table the same color blue as our downstairs bathroom, which is right across the hall from the play room. Also that shade of blue? The diaper storage shelf (former dish display rack) that I picked up for $12 at the Junk in the Trunk Vintage Market:

Remember what that first looked like?

It’s not quite finished either. I’m going to add a colorful fabric with elastic around the bottom shelf to hold those diapers in and add some more color.

The changing table is also a second-hand find.

We found it at a local kid’s consignment store for $30! That is so much cheaper than buying one new and even less than I could find on my local Craig’s List. And it TOTALLY beats the makeshift table we were using for a few weeks:

Pretty bad, no?

You may recall, even some of the fabric used in the embroidery hoop art is from a thrift store…

See this post for more on that.

Finally, I made a really fun find at a thrift store in Del Mar, California last week:

These sweet little mirrors – and elephant and a hippo were just $2 bucks each. We still need to find a special toddler-height spot for them, but I’m sure we will soon.

Also coming soon:

• Replacing the non-child-safe curtains and blinds with a valance and safe blind
• New bedding for the daybed (currently, our former guest room queen-sized duvet is making an awkward cover up)
• Perhaps a fun paint job… (don’t tell Jason!)
• Area rug (the carpet is taking quite a beating!)
• DIY coloring book display rack
• More art/wall hangings
• ANOTHER BABY! 😉

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Embroidery Hoop Playroom Art

The playroom is slowly coming together, but let’s go ahead and put a fork in one wall. It is done.

If you’ve been following this blog since the nursery design days, you may remember those faces. The sheep and cow are original paintings by my mom. She gave them to us for the nursery, but they just didn’t fit there. But now they have the PERFECT spot.

Thanks to this dude, Kenton is obsessed with saying, “Moooooooooo!” and now thinks that’s what all animals say.

He’s working on “Baaaa” – but doesn’t quite have it down yet. (He does, however, do a great ROAR.)

Anyway, we are so grateful to my talented momma for giving us these paintings. They did look a bit lonely on that big ol’ wall, so I filled the space between them with some embroidery hoops and a menagerie of fabrics:

I’m really excited with how these turned out. Each piece of fabric has a story and some have ties to other rooms in the Dream. It’s also so cool that this little collage started out as a pile of random fabrics that seemed daunting…

I scored the hoops at a thrift store for $2 each…

I took my time and played around with which fabrics would go in the different size hoops – which wound up being primarily decided based on how much fabric I had on hand.

So, people are doing this every.where. Displaying all sorts of fun fabrics in these hoops. I never really understood how you could tie this together, but what I learned doing this project is that you shouldn’t overanalyze it! 🙂 I love that these fabrics all coordinate, but don’t match… and they all have a little story…

Yes! This is the fabric I found recently at a thrift store. You’ll see more of it in the playroom soon!

Saw this in the clearance section at Home Fabrics and had to snag it. You’ll also see more of this in the playroom soon!

Yeah, so, the “Dream outdoor collection” has been a work in progress for about two years (embarrassing). I’ve made two pillows and cut all the fabric (the hard part!) for new seat cushions, but have yet to actually sew them together. Anywho, these polka-dots are part of the patio fun.

I snagged a small piece of this fabric from the clearance section of Jo-Ann’s a while ago. I just loved the print and color. Unfortunately, there was not an obvious place for it – until now. (Ironically, I found the SAME fabric with different colors on clearance at Home Fabrics a couple weeks ago – and that will soon be making an appearance in the master bedroom and a couple other spots. Yay!)

And I had just enough of the yellow striped fabric leftover from the nursery portrait project for the itty-bitty hoop. I LOVE that the downstairs playroom has a subtle tie to the upstairs nursery. 🙂

So, this project specifically cost me $10. The paintings were free, the fabric is all scraps from other projects and the hoops set me back just $10. I would definitely call that – SUCCESS!

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New Kid’s Playroom!

We are changing a lot around here and not just diapers.

BABIES!  They cause a lot of things to change.  Amen?

When they grow, they like things.  Things take up room and space and make noise and are fantastic for individual play time, but in a designated area.  Up until now, that’s been a corner of the living room.

This really blurry cell phone picture of Kenton climbing the stairs with toys strewn about in the background is the only photo I have of that nonsense. Clearly, it wasn’t something I was proud of! Our front door is just off to the left – so that was the scene that greeted people as soon as they entered the Dream. Not exactly welcoming.

We have now completely overhauled that room and made it much less kid-friendly (Ha! Seriously… sharp corners, a bar, “expensive-if-we-would-have-paid-full-price” furniture… not for the kiddos!)… which means the toys are gone and now in the guest bedroom! It’s the best room in the Dream for a play space.

My view from the kitchen – before the transformation.

Our guest room (the empty one with the ugly standing lamp) is right off the family room and kitchen.  We do get a steady stream of visitors, but we don’t feel like a B&B. So, we thought we could sacrifice the queen guest bed for something smaller and use the space for our little man’s possessions.

Here is what it looked like before:

We sold the furniture and mattress on Craig’s List. I also feel compelled to tell you that the comforter seen above only lived with us for a short time. We replaced it with a super cute Angela Adams polka-dot duvet cover. (We’re a bit obsessed with polka-dots). Okay, I feel better now.

Now, the guest/playroom is filled up with a trundle bed for guests/doubles as a day bed for reading time (or mommy rest time while a cute baby boy plays, but screams in horror if I leave his presence), sweet original art, a new (to us) changing table, kid’s art table, toys (TONS of toys!), and one happy pre-toddler…

Well, mostly happy…

I’ll be back soon with updates on this room… including how I turned this menagerie of fabric into a real focal point…

So far, we’ve only invested about $70 in the room. Sweet! More on that soon. For now, I need to tend to a baby boy calling “mommommommommaaaaa” over the monitor.

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