Now that Lee has his own office space downtown, we’ve transformed the portion of our living room that used to house his home office into a playroom for Camille – and I love it! The setup is nice because the play area is behind our couch, and as you walk in the room you can see the tops of toys peeking out, but it’s not completely in your face. So once she goes to bed, we can sit on the couch, watch TV and be grown ups without the toys all around us.
One of the first things we did to turn the area into her playroom was put plastic foam mats down. We bought these in a pack at Sam’s for 20 bucks! They’re great because they provide some cushion from the cold hardwoods, and they’re easy to wipe clean. They also help define her play area.


We packed up about half of her toys and put them away. We’ll bring them out soon and pack some of these up, just to keep things fresh and to reduce the visible clutter. Our latest and possibly greatest addition to the play area was the piece of furniture we got last weekend at Ikea. We’d been looking for a place to store her smaller toys and books. Previously they’d been tossed into her pack-n-play which meant she couldn’t retrieve them on her own, or into cardboard diaper boxes which were less than classy.

This piece of furniture works well because it has a bunch of little cubbies that can be used for books, toys, blankets, diapers, whatever we want to cram in there. And I was going to buy baskets for her small toys, but we already had these buckets and they actually work perfectly. She takes all the toys out and uses the buckets as toys too. Because it’s real wood, I hope it’ll stand up to all the playing, and if we ever don’t need it for toys, I think it’s a pretty piece of furniture for anywhere in the house. And it’s just the right height to fit behind our sofa and a perfect place to put our lamps. From the other side of the room, it just looks like a sofa table, not a kid toy box. Camille seems to really like it, because her toys are so accessible now. Yay for Ikea, and yay for us!