attempt number 472 to contain the kid crap

Gah! Toys, toys, everywhere toys! If you are like most parents of small children, you have approximately 11 billion toys and no where to put them. It's nearly impossible to contain them.  I have come up with a few strategies though, and here they are;

• Limit what you allow people to give.  *Warning Grandparents hate this one!* Our daughter never had a play kitchen, her own tepee or anything bigger than she was. She was not scarred by this, I promise. We live in a 1200 square foot house, we just don't have room for that.
• Edit constantly and liberally.  Although our daughter plays with all her toys, she is hardly ever really attached to anything.  She's a spoiled child of the 21st century... she knows more is on the way.  If you are really struggling with this one, you can always edit and keep them in the garage for say, a month.  If the children don't look for anything in the donation pile, out it goes with no guilt.
• Remember, it's your house! You are the one that goes to work to pay for it.  YOU get to dictate how it looks, not the kids.  

So over the 7 years we've had this kiddo, I've tried a bunch of "solutions" that haven't really worked.  Most are just plain old too small or not sturdy enough.   Most of the pictures you see of "toy storage" involve about 3 stuffed animals, some balls, some blocks and an olde timey train. Yeah right.

 

If that was the extent of our toys a lot of things would work.  It's like those pictures of closet organization where the person has three pairs of pants, five shirts, and two purses.  Totally disconnected from real life! Plus, if you are doing any sort of storage in say, the living room, it's still all out in the open.  And again, if our toys looked like the toys above, no problem, in real life though there is at least 3 shades of neon plastic, ponies with hair that will never be straight again, and at a minimum 20 books that have been read to tatters.

So what's our solution? The best thing I've ever found is a giant wicker trunk.  What I like best is that I can just throw everything in it and close the lid.  Outta sight, outta mind.

Open

Closed

The kitty gets to stay out because she's so cute and I don't mind having a few toys lying about. We DO have a child living with us and it's totally fine with me that she's represented by a few things, but the bulk needs to go away when she hits the hay.   Best part about the basket we have now, is that it was only $30 on sale at Cost Plus. So it it gets destroyed at some point, oh well.  If not, it'll be great at storage for other things as the daughter gets older and we have fewer and fewer toys.

Ta-Dah!

Finally! Violet's room is done.  Well... it's 98% done, there is still one thing left I want to do.  Violet had originally wanted an "Angry Birds" room.  Call me horrible, but no.  not going to happen. So this is my version of angry birds. They aren't terribly angry but they are beautiful!

The yellow bed came out perfectly.  It went beautifully with the bedding Violet and I agreed on, which is Spring Sparrow by Pottery Barn. I found the quilt which was just the right rusty red I was looking for at Target.  I thought I was never going to find anything that would work, but there it was, just waiting for me last weekend.

The other side of the room.  Violet's room is extremely small, only 8x10 so we did a few things to maximize the space we do have.  The boxes on the side of the dresser are part of that.

I've had these boxes kicking around the house forever, not knowing exactly what to do with them as we don't really have a great space on the wall for them.  They were absolutely perfect for this project.  One holds library books, one holds hair brushes and accessories and the one attached to her desk is basically a stand in for a night stand.  In such a small space there was no room for both (believe me, we tried!) so a sconce above the bed and this box are just right as as a "stand" in.

 Last thing the ruler growth chart! There are a million tutorials out there on how to do this, and it really couldn't be simpler.  Pick up a piece of wood at the lumber yard, stain it, and add numbers with a sharpie. I absolutely LOVE how it came out.  It's a really fun piece to have to measure everyone that comes over, even adults!


That's it! I'm hoping to take a few better pictures this weekend, but in the Pacific Northwest, who knows when we'll get enough sun to improve them so bear with me!

More Pinterest Hacks!

Pinterest Version

Here it is, the ruler that's been haunting me.  So I decided to incorporate it into Violet's room.  I enlisted my Dad to help me, as he's a civil engineer and really good at measuring things correctly.  Honestly, it was just as easy as it appears to be.  The only tricky part was getting the numbers right.  We went through several ideas of what the best way to transfer them to the wood.   Turns out this tutorial was right, only I didn't use the pencil on the back.  I just eyeballed it.  I love how it turned out.   I'll show the full version when I finally, finally, FINALLY post about Violet's finished room.  For now, here's a section.  Not bad for a $10 project.

My Version

Location, location, location

Just like in real estate, location is everything when it comes to hanging things on the walls.  Get it wrong and it looks like your 5 year old decorated your home. So how do you get it right? Templates. Keep in mind this is going to take you a little extra time, but the result will be worth it.

All you have to do is take whatever object you are hanging on the wall and trace it with craft paper, or if you are feeling festive and have some lying around, wrapping paper. The other thing you'll want to do is mark where the hanging points on the paper.  That way, once you get the placement right, you can put the nails in over the paper templates thereby getting exactly the same placement as the template. this comes in handy when you are wanting to hang something in a grid or straight line and your frames don't have exactly the same hanging points.

In this case, I was hanging a scattering of barn stars above my bed and wanted to make sure I got the "Oh, I just randomly threw those up on the wall.  Don't they look fabulous? There was no effort at all" look.  Here are all the paper stars hung up with tape.

Paper Stars

Once I got the placement right, I hammered in the nails, ripped down the paper stars and hung the actual stars.

Actual Stars

That's it! It seems like a little more work, but it's so much easier to move tape than nails if you get it wrong the first time around and you can really play around with it to get the exact look you want.

Cheers!

Pinterest *Sigh*

Unless you've been living under a rock you may have heard of Pinterest.  It's nothing short of completely amazing.  Every idea you could ever think of, and a lot that would have never occurred to you live on that site. The sheer number of creative bloggers is astounding to say the least, and I'd like to blame Pinterest for taking up all of my spare time by either looking at the site, trying to replicate something I found or trying to track down some amazing item that I never knew I just had to have. This brings me to how I spent my weekend.  Look what I found.

Beautiful isn't it? 

GORGEOUS! Just stunning, and clearly, I have to have it for myself.  Well... not for myself exactly, for my very lucky daughter Violet.  O.k. she'd be lucky if she cared about it even a little.  So I found this on Craig's list:

Pretty close right?

Great! I'll take it.  I read the above blog and the bloggess explained how she'd sanded, primed and painted the bed.  Cool.  Sounds easy.  I can do it.  Have I ever done anything like this before? Heck no!

Sanding...
What?
What does your garage look like?

Sanding was a bit scary...  of course, what's the worst thing that could happen?  I'd have scratched up a bed I got for a bargain on Craig's list. Then I primed it using the metal Rustoleum spray paint.  Then I began painting, and painting, and painting! I'm on coat #3 and I think I need one more.  Wow.  That's a lot of painting. Even though this bed isn't ornate there more nooks and crannys that seem possible! I think one more coat ought to do it.  I surely hope so.  Here's a preview.  I do love how it looks so far, so hopefully it'll be worth an entire weekend's plus of work!

Preview of project yellow bed

So stay tuned for the final finished product.....

Cheers!