I trust anyone out there who is a parent can sympathise with me when I say how lovely christmas was and how generous everyone was with your kids but the aftermath of the reality now is we have mountains of toys and nowhere to put them! Every corner I turn there is shape sorters here, Anna and Elsie dolls there and book everywhere! The new year challenge for us is how we can contain all these new toys etc in one place.
Excuse the pun but we toyed with the idea last year of turning our dining room into a playroom. We hardly ever use the room as we have a table in our kitchen and that is just easier with the kids. The day we talked about it we then asked my in-laws round for dinner and then we used the dining room…typical!
Now we have the sunroom extension built I am so conscious that I don’t want it to turn into the toy room. The big benefit of the extension does mean there is the room to move the dining table into there so it can be extended to fit the entire family and this is what we did at christmas. It was then that we realised we could put the table into the kitchen, get rid of our current kitchen table which doesn’t owe us much as it was a gumtree purchase and make the dining room the playroom thus fitting in with all of our needs. It also means that both the sunroom and the playroom would open onto the garden via double doors and would be really useful on summer days.
I think I really only hesitated on the play room idea as our dining room and living room are connected by glass doors although the glass is a pattern of small square panes you can still see into the playroom and would I want to be looking at all that mess? I think I could handle it if it means toys arent everywhere perhaps!
All the items in the dining room are now on various sites to be sold and so far so good. I have been able to sell the bulk of the items between sideboards, lamps, home accessories…the colour teal must still very much be on trend thankfully 🙂 The knock on effect of this is that I am now addicted to Pinterest and trying to get together ideas for storage, a colour scheme and how to utilise the room best. I have found some great inspiration from the ideas below and let’s be honest the best part of this whole transformation is that a visit to Ikea is almost 100% certain……sorry Chris :):)
