Zone 2: Reorganized playroom - a $30 project!

Like I said yesterday in my post about my reorganized pantry, I'm tackling a zone a day on the blog.  Today, I'm showing off the new playroom that cost me almost nothing to redo.

Let's take a look at the old playroom first so we can see how far we came.

I'd say pretty far, but I'm biased because I've had to stare at this brightly colored playroom for years.

I mean, it was a fine playroom.  Colorful, that's for sure.  Good for a boy.  But I was tired of it and I wanted something lighter (not so in-your-face colorful) and more appropriate for a girl and a boy.  So with the help of a friend, Craigslist and some dollar stores, I turned it into this for less than $30 (not including gas - I'm not that exact!).

It's not perfect, but I love it and the kids love it (well, Addie pretty much couldn't care less, but Ben walked in the room and went, "Ooooooooh!" which was all the approval I needed).

The rug was free thanks to a super sweet, generous friend who passed it along to us.

This bookshelf was free to us.  My grandpa made it when I was a little girl (meaning it's solid wood and one sturdy piece of furniture), I painted it last year to go in Addie's nursery and now, it's a "general store."  The last thing I plan to accomplish to finish off their store is to build an awning, similar to this one from Design Dazzle:

The kids have a ton of food, so I wanted it organized - more for me than them, if I'm being honest.  It was driving me crazy!  One day last week we went through all the kids toys and we separated them out into organized piles and took pictures of each pile.  I quickly & easily added some text to each picture in Picasa to label it, then printed them off on cardstock.  Easy as pie and great for little ones who can't read yet.  So that's what you see here.  All of these bins came from Target's dollar aisle, but the blue ones I got months ago and they don't have them at my Target anymore.

The sign was just something I whipped up in Gimp (I wish I had more graphic design skills, but basic is all you get from me), printed on cardstock and stuck in an old frame.

That's Adalyn's side of the built-in bookshelf.  I got the blue baskets at Dollar Tree.

And labeled them all.

That's Ben's side.  I got those baskets at Target before I got smart and figured out how much cheaper they are at the dollar stores.

Oh, and the white sheers?  Those were free.  I just shopped my basement for those and that alone made a huge difference!

They're all labeled, too.

The bookshelf was a free Craigslist find.  Now that we have a van, we can take advantage of the free stuff people don't need anymore.  Hey, I'm not too proud to take someone else's junk!  Better for the environment too, right?  And much better for the pocketbook.  We secured it to the wall and filled it up with the kids' books.  Well, and ours, too.

Another pending project is to add beadboard to the backs of this bookshelf.  I've been seeing that a lot in the blogosphere and love the way it looks!

Last week, we realized that we pretty much never watch the TV in our living room.  It's a nice, big (enough) flat screen, but we do 95% of our TV watching right before bed in our bedroom on a teeny, tiny...computer monitor.  The only time our TV gets used other than sports for Tim is when the kids watch PBS or a movie.  So I thought, why not try to find an old TV on Craigslist nice & cheap and just put it in their playroom?  Then we can turn our living room into a sitting room, which is what it pretty much is anyway, free up more space (our living room is pretty small) and hang our flat screen TV in our bedroom.  The kids don't have free access to this TV any more than they did in our living room, so it seemed like a win-win.  The TV stand was another free Craigslist score this week and the TV was $10.  My mom & dad gave us their VCR/DVD combo player when they got a new one and she gave me all our old Disney VHS's, so we're pretty set!

Here's their little reading/TV watching area.  I've been drooling over these Pottery Barn Anywhere Chairs forever and a day, but I don't know that we'll ever be able to justify the cost.  Maybe someday.  :)

That's our new playroom!  Like I said, it's not perfect.  It's not as coordinated as my crazy brain would love it to someday be, but I really couldn't be happier.  It feels like a brand new place.  It feels a little more grown-up and since Ben is a little more grown-up now (sob!), it all works out.  For $30, I call this a WIN!

PS - In case you didn't notice my new blog header, I'm combining my business blog & my personal blog because trying to keep up two blogs is just...um...too much.