Our New Flex Playroom/Living Room
If there was ever a room at the cozy cottage that has seen the most changes, it’s been the one that started out as a dining room. This is the year for small changes and projects while we save Save SAVE for a kitchen, and here is the latest change: we now have a playroom. Kind of.
The middle room on the first floor started as a part dining room and reading area (you can see it here, a month after we moved in), which we then changed to be a second living room when Gus was born (see here). But he turned 2 a couple of weeks ago (oh my gosh, I can’t believe my baby is 2!) and we surprised him with a play kitchen. In order to make room for the play kitchen, we had to shift a few things around. In doing so, we essentially now have a playroom that can easily flex as a comfortable living room with just a little clean up.
So now instead of two IKEA bookshelves side by side to act as a sort of book and toy credenza, we have one and then the play kitchen next to it. The other bookshelf is upstairs in the office (more on that coming soon). We’ve been shoving additional toys and trucks under the chair in the corner but I think, to help keep chaos at bay, I’ll start hiding more toys in the garage and swapping them in and out more frequently.
And the only other change here was doing a little art switcheroo. Previously, our metal letters were on the larger wall above the sofa and a small gallery wall was centered in between the two windows. That didn’t make sense – the larger wall should have the art that takes up more space. So I switched them.
Now the R&D metal letter art is vertical in between the two windows, and the photos take up the right amount of visual space above the sofa. I beefed up the gallery wall with a few photos that we had previously hung upstairs. These photos have lots of blue in them from beaches in Haiti, which add a little more color to the mostly browns and neutral tones in the photos Daniel took while living in Japan. The added blue in this gallery wall helps connect this living room half to the playroom half, where there is another ocean print from our trip to the Galapagos Islands.
Now we have this flex living room and playroom that is comfortable for all of us for as long as we need it to be this way. It’s a little change with a big impact.
