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Posted by on Mar 3, 2012 in Life | 8 comments

Half sitting room/half playroom

Half sitting room/half playroom

The spring cleaning continues around our house. Today the sitting room was our target for improvement. These days it’s hard to tell where the sitting room ends and the playroom begins. I guess those are the joys of a small house, where space is at a total premium. The room is almost completely overrun with toys, and even our bookcase which was once sparsely decorated with a few select ornaments and an assortment of books, now looks like it belongs in a toy shop.

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Lately it’s been getting to the point where it doesn’t matter how much tidying we do in the evenings, we can never fully put the toys away, and the room always feels a bit more like a playroom than sitting room.

In a effort to reduce that feeling, even a little bit, tonight we moved the bookcase from the sitting room out to the office, and brought the office storage shelves into the sitting room instead. A quick trip to IKEA later and we had some storage boxes for the toys that fitted perfectly on the shelves.

I think it still looks a bit like a playroom but perhaps that can’t be helped. It certainly looks tidier to me, so I’ll take that as an improvement.

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8 Comments

  1. We have those shelves and boxes too! Liked them so much we bought them twice!

    • We recently put similar shelves and boxes in two of our wardrobes and they’ve been great for organising the chaos. Slowly but surely they’re helping convert my “leavers” to “putters”!! 😉

  2. What a transformation. Ikea are fab for storage.

    •  And four days later, I’m pleased to report that it still looks just as tidy. So it seems to be working!

  3. Hi Lisa,
    Brenda here. First of all I must say that your blog is fab, full of great information and advice, I will be passing it on and linking up. I know the feeling about the playroom thing, we don’t have the luxury of a playroom either so our living room is gradually turning into one too. Love those Ikea shelves, they look great .Definitely a big improvement.

    •  Thanks Brenda! It’s amazing how the toys just start to take over, no matter how much you might try to avoid it. 🙂

  4. I never liked the idea of a playroom anyway, think it’s better to live our lives together : ) Great idea to look for ways to help the sitting room be a nice place for all the family. I tried the Montessori (I think!) idea of boxing away toys & rotating them a bit so they are fresh. Has been working well…place still a mess but don’t think that’ll ever change…need to box (get rid of!) all our own crap, toys are least offenders lol! 

    • Yeah, we do a lot of rotation of toys. I think it’s great. Although the new setup seems to have inbuilt rotation! Because only one box comes out at a time, Little Man generally doesn’t get to everything each day, and so tomorrow he starts with something new.

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