The last time you saw the nursery, the furniture was arranged with the glider in the corner.

Oh and there’s a Mamaroo temporarily in the other corner. We just put it together and wanted to make sure it worked. The point is, there’s a giant empty wall next to the glider.

I was waiting to have the glider to decide what type of furniture to put next to it. I wasn’t sure if we’d want a small table, toy storage, bookcase, etc., but I knew we’d want something to use as a surface to put down bottles and other things. Then we realized how small this room was getting with everything in it…

I had the glider positioned on the right side of the window…

So I just slid it out to the other side of the window.

The good thing about this is now we can get a small bookcase that will be closer to centered on the wall, but still next to the chair. Then we can fill the wall space above the bookcase with a nice gallery wall or something similar.

We measured about how large of a bookcase we’d want after moving the chair. The ottoman does stick out into the room a little bit more now, but there’s still plenty of space to navigate to the crib. As the baby grows, maybe the configuration will change.

I searched the Ikea website and saw that the only short bookcase they had was the Expedit, which I wasn’t crazy about in this room (though we have a black/brown one in the office). I turned to Target and quickly found the Carson 2-shelf bookcase.

(via Target)

The image on the Target website isn’t great, but you get the idea. The dimensions worked, plus I was able to get free shipping and 5% off for using my Target debit card. Since the image wasn’t great, I wasn’t yet sold and turned to Google, where I discovered that this was just the shorter version of this bookcase that Jessie from Cape 27 has that I blogged about last year!

(via Cape 27)

Which of course got my wheels turning further…. not only should I buy the bookcase, but I should paint the back of it green like the nursery closet!

It would look a little something like this…

So I ordered it. It will be here early next week and will make a nice home for some books, a humidifier and a gallery wall 🙂

Say that 3 times fast!

So we’ve already told you that our striped office is becoming a playroom. We’ve been scheming this since we moved in (probably before) so when we painted those stripes it was totally in our plan to do something fun, yet classy, and neutral. I know that kids come with a lot of gear and we wanted a place on the first floor to store things easily. Other than the stripes, I didn’t know what to do storage wise. For one, we have always known that we want to build a window seat by the bay window.

That’s a picture from when we painted those stripes back in March. We figure a nice little cushioned bench there with storage underneath would provide some much needed adult seating. Plus it would be so pretty 🙂

As for toy, book, gadget, whatever storage, I wanted something that didn’t look childish. This room is still the front room in our house and it has double french doors enterting it. I wanted it to be kid friendly yet still flow with the entryway. We received a Pottery Barn Kids catalog a while back and I spotted this little storage system, which was getting closer to what I was thinking…

(via Pottery Barn Kids)

I like the closed and open storage and I love the artwork on the top, but my problem with most playroom specific stuff is that it is so short. I understand that kids are short and it’s meant for them, but lines often cut a room in half. I don’t think some higher shelves for less used things or artwork would hurt anyone 🙂

While reading one of my favorite blogs, Centsational Girl, I saw that she took some Billy bookcases from Ikea and turned them into built-ins. I’ve wanted to do this forever and she has convinced me… and showed how it’s done.

 (via Centsational Girl)

I got all giddy when I saw this and immediately told Mike that WE MUST DO THIS FOR THE PLAYROOM. While we’re not comfortable building bookcases, we’re comfortable adding molding, which is all that needs to be done here. We can throw some baskets in the lower shelves for toy dumping and maybe even keep some decorative things up high. Ever since I saw this, I cannot stop thinking about it. It was the motivation for our Ikea trip last weekend and why I wanted to get a nicer light.

We have time before we’ll probably do much else with this room since the baby won’t be roaming around in there on his/her own for a while. But it will be nice to store things for the time being and have a room for the baby that’s off limits for the cats. You know, since our house is mostly hardwood now 🙂

I’m on a mission… called make playroom functional and fun for kids, yet pretty for adults 🙂