Organizing the playroom was one crucial step in reclaiming part of our basement for my own use, and yes, reclaiming my very sanity as toys were taking over the entire house.  Besides my own three little hooligans, I have a young niece and nephew who visit often, especially when school is out, and when the gang gets together they have a rip-roaring good time... at the expense of my personal possessions sometimes (fond memories of a Wii remote cracking the big screen TV, just like that commercial).  They have always managed to leave the basement in total chaos. 

We had given the kids a large playroom in the main part of our mostly-finished basement.  We installed nice white built-in shelves and cabinets, including their own entertainment center.  There was plenty of room for romping and burning off extra energy.  And, I thought, it would be easy for them to put their toys away when they were done playing.

The result was a complete disaster area that I was embarrassed for even the exterminator to see (I imagine him saying, duh lady clean your house if you want to get rid of pests).  Kids (and the dog) all ran wild in there, letting popsicles melt in gooey puddles you didn't find for weeks, mingled with spilled chocolate milk buried under a layer of scattered blocks, puzzle pieces, chewed up stuffed animals, story books, broken crayons, and electronic games...and much much more.

I have learned a few things since my first playroom attempt.  This past weekend the playroom was moved into a smaller, more enclosed space in the basement.  The big room with the TV in it is now my deluxe exercise room (including a punching bag - much needed).  The kids can still run around and blow off steam in the big room but they are not allowed to leave toys in there.

The new, organized playroom in a smaller space:

 

If you are looking into how to organize your kids' playroom, here are a few suggestions from hard-learned experience:

• Playroom organization begins with purging.  You have to get the kids out of the house for this one, trust me, you don't want them "helping" you decide what to keep.  That said, before you do this take note of what your kids are currently enjoying playing with, and also remember things they used to love playing with until they lost all the pieces.  You want to get rid of clutter and excess, but there is no need to get rid of honestly fun toys they like if they're still in good shape.  Things to trash: kids meal toys, broken toys, puzzles with missing pieces, toys the dog chewed up.  
  
  
• A bigger playroom is not better.  The more space there is to scatter things, the more mixed up everything will get, and the harder it will be to restore order to the chaos.  It will be hard for kids to find their toys, let alone enjoy playing with them.
  
  
• Use mid-sized containers for grouping toys together. Use plastic bins and baskets big enough to hold chunky toys, but not so big as to hold a LOT of toys.  If the bin is too large, the kids will feel they need to dump the whole thing out to find the toy they want to play with.  Too small and you won't be able to group enough things together, you'll just have a clutter of bins.
  
  
• Label your bins in a child-friendly way.  Use big lettering as well as pictures to show what belongs in the bin.  I was not a perfectionist about the pictures.  I just found photos online (Amazon was useful for this) of things that were representative of the toys I was storing.  I put the labels inside plastic sheet protectors or just covered them with tape and slapped them onto the containers directly. 
  
  
• Be creative in grouping toys together.  There are obvious things, like Duplos, or wooden blocks that obviously go together with their own kind.  But what about a bin full of everything Elmo, or a collection of anything that could be called a small animal?  Give things their own special group to belong to and it will help kids remember where to put it back. Here were my catergories:
  
  Duplos
  Mega Bloks
  Thomas the Tank Engine
  Magnet Toys
  Balls
  Trucks/Cars (also included some flying vehicles)
  Star Wars Action Figures
  Costumes (big bin also doubles as a table with four small chairs around)
  Dora Toys
  Wooden Blocks
  Mr. Potato Head
  Other Action Figures
  Doll Clothes
  Barbie
  Toddler Toys
  Dolls
  Stuffies (stuffed animals)
  Kitchen Dishes
  Kitchen Food (toy food that is)
  Nerf Laser Gun and Darts
  Penguins and Puffles
  Elmo Toys
  Little People
  Boobahs and Teletubbies
  Coin Toys (a toy piggy bank and a cash register)
  Trio and Castle Set
  Star Wars Practice Blades (a narrow drawer for my son to keep two old vacuum cleaner crevice tools he likes to pretend are his practice lightsabers)
  Baby Toys
  Puppets
  Peek-a-Bloks
  
  
• Avoid catch-all toy bins as much as possible.  If you have a big pile of toys that don't seem to belong to any one set, comb through them once more and see if you can't find enough to form a category like "Dora Toys" or "Magnet Toys".  In the end, you might end up with an amorphous group of stuff that you have to resort to calling "Toddler Toys" but keep that sort of thing to a minimum, to avoid the large bin of mystery toys problem.
  
  
• Set the rules for long-term playroom organization success.   Our rules are simple:

1. No food or drinks allowed in the basement (including the playroom).
2. All toys need to put away when you are done with them.
3. Before bed, every single toy in the whole house has to be put back in the playroom (with exceptions for stuffies to sleep with, and my son's Lego collection which lives in his room).  

This weekend we couldn't keep the kids away for ever... when the purging was done, they were around for the organizational part, and they really wanted to help.  They enjoyed taping the signs onto the bins and putting items in their new homes.  Today the cousins came over and once again threw toys all over the room (much to my kids' dismay!), but they had been forewarned that they were expected to put things away in the places as I had labeled them.  And lo and behold, before their mom came to get them, they had everything put back as if they had never been there.

 

And yes, it is more fun for the kids to play in an organized playroom, especially for my 2.5 year old who thinks it's like Christmas, all these "new" toys to play with.  I'll have to keep reminding them all to clean up after themselves, but kids like knowing what's expected of them.  They didn't want to have a messy playroom before, they just didn't know how to handle it.  Now they have an easy-to-understand system of organization to help them quickly put toys where they are supposed to go. 

Maybe I won't need that punching bag quite so badly as I did before.  

 

Posted by Caeli at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In our basement we have an extra refrigerator.  It was the refrigerator that was in this house when we bought it, and it works fine, but when we remodeled the kitchen we went with a stainless-look refrigerator (giving up, I might add, several cubic feet of refrigerator and freezer space in our kitchen to fit it into our design, since we did not want to spring for a sub-zero).

The extra refrigerator comes in handy for storing the organic chickens and turkeys we buy from a fellow homeschooling family.  But when we bring home the birds it is sometimes necessary to let them remain in the refrigerator part for a few days before moving them into the freezer.  That is where the problem starts... they are in plastic bags, but the bags are not leak-proof.  As a result, there was quite a mess on the shelves of the fridge, and in the freezer as well since my husband transferred them directly over without paying attention to the leaky mess. 

I ignored the problem for quite a while, being too busy with many other remodeling, painting and organizing projects.  But I am now all about anti-procrastination.  I asked my husband to unplug the fridge so it could thaw out, and intended to have him clean it shortly thereafter.

We both forgot about it.  I would only remember it late at night when we couldn't do anything about it. 

But finally late one night this week I remembered before we went to bed, and made an appointment to get up at 6:30 AM the next morning so we could tackle cleaning the fridge together.  It had been unplugged for several days, with the doors shut... a big no-no.  I wanted to take care of it before any more mildew grew.

Here's what I know about cleaning refrigerators.  You shouldn't use strong chemicals.  The ideal is probably hot water and vinegar (maybe 1 gallon to 1 cup ratio).  I threw in a little bit of dish soap too, since some of the mess was kind of stuck-on.  Our hot tap water is very hot indeed, so I felt confident we took care of any chicken messes quite thoroughly.  My husband brought all the shelves, drawers, baskets and bins upstairs and I scrubbed them while he wiped down the interior of the refrigerator and freezer.  

Finally, our early morning collaboration (only took 1-1/2 hours) resulted in this:

 

That blue box is a generic box of baking soda, just in case of any lingering chicken odors.  

Now that I know I have a clean extra refrigerator/freezer, I look forward to the next chicken butchering season, when I will learn how to make our own chicken stock and keep it stored in the freezer.  I know, just what everyone dreams about, right?  And I'm a vegetarian!  Oh but it feels good knowing your family has whole, organic food to eat.  And an extra refrigerator to store it in!

Posted by Caeli at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our 1980s era house does not have asbestos floor tiles.  However this issue and many related ones have kept me away from blogging and anything else to do with our own home lately.  That's because I've been serving on a floor replacement committee at my church, and dealing with some very interesting issues.

While my experience in home remodeling (via the many projects we have taken on in our homes) has come in handy while serving on this committee, something I had not had to deal with in our houses was asbestos.  However, this did come up when my parents bought their 1901 Victorian home.  In their case, the asbestos was located in insulation on the heating pipes in the basement.  I have memories of the basement being sealed off with plastic and men in protective coveralls, gloves and head gear carrying out the sealed garbage bags. I was glad that most of the spider webs went with them!

The asbestos problem at the church is different.  In fact, it was debatable whether it was even necessary for us to deal with the asbestos tiles at this point. The asbestos tile flooring dates back to circa 1920, and in the intervening years had been covered with other layers. Most recently, when the mauve carpet was installed in the 1980s, a new particle board layer was placed on top of the other floors, then the carpet.

We were pretty sure, because of the date of the floor, that those old tiles were in fact asbestos, but we had to have it tested to confirm it. Core samples were drilled all over the building. The tests confirmed asbestos in the main body of the church, the sacristy and the altar boy’s room.

So should we remove the asbestos?  That was the hot topic.  Asbestos floor tiles are not so dangerous as something like asbestos insulation, which more easily goes airborne, which everyone knows due to the legal ads on TV, causes mesothelioma.  Asbestos tiles are hard and don't break very easily.  The fibers are not likely to end up floating around in the air, so the chance of someone inhaling an asbestos particle into their lung and getting cancer is much less likely.

Moreover, the asbestos was completely covered by several layers of flooring and subflooring.  It was not dangerous.  But knowing it was there, and many people either suspected or knew it was there, some church goers might be worried about it.

For our floor committee the point that tipped the scale toward removing the asbestos tiles had to do not so much with mesothelioma or any other danger from asbestos, but with providing a good structure for our new floor.  We had decided to replace the carpeting with porcelain tile, and with that much square footage, we were concerned about cracks from deflection.  We could reduce risk of cracking if we had a nice solid base with no decaying layers of old flooring beneath it. The fact that we were taking care of the asbestos issue for now and all time was an added benefit.  I'm happy to say that our church has gotten in the habit of biting the bullet and doing it right the first time when we take on projects.  (It's a lesson learned the hard way.)  So the asbestos tiles are being removed by an asbestos abatement crew.  Every door to the church is sealed.  But when all is said and done, the floor will be taken down to the original wood.  Then the cement backer board will be installed, and the tile on top of that, so we should be set for a hundred years or so.

Posted by Caeli at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We mentioned earlier that we're finishing up remodeling the basement exercise room.  One of the projects involved installing a suspended ceiling.  A valuable lesson was recently learned-- if you buy panels that can easily be snapped in half, and you have thin strips within reach of a six year old boy and his sidekick 4 year old sister--  you are asking for trouble!

One day, as I walk past the room, I notice my scrap pieces are missing.  I needed these strips, about 8 inches wide, to fill in along the far wall to finish the project.  They were already the correct 4 feet in length, and would sit perfectly between the wall and the last row of full tiles.  And they disappeared.  

That is, all but the one 8 inch wide by 10 inch (vs. 48 inch) long scrap I spotted.  After a few looks at my children, the look that means fess up or there will be...consequences, my son opened up the doors to a nearby old changing table, and stuffed in the cabinet were my suspended ceiling panels, all nicely broken up into 10 inches to 1 foot lengths.  He explained to me that they were "cleaning up" and put the pieces away so that they fit in the closet.  I was not amused!  

Lessons learned:  lock the door to keep kiddos away from anything breakable!  Also, laugh with the kids-- it's just a ceiling panel.

Posted by Caeli at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After we finished remodeling our kitchen, we had to decide what to do about the room below it.  You see, we basically moved our kitchen from the center of the house to the corner, so we had to move or install new electrical, plumbing supplies, drain lines, and a gas line for the stove.  That meant that we removed the old drywall ceiling from room below, clearing the way to install the new utilities in the exposed ceiling joists.  The time finally arrived to put up a new ceiling in that room to make it functional again.  

We opted for a suspended ceiling really by necessity.  I suppose in theory we could have installed drywall over most of the ceiling, but the slope of the drain line meant that we'd need to install a soffit around that area of the ceiling if we wanted to gain the few inches of height.  Also, and this is an important tip/warning-- we installed the utilities without thinking of the eventual ceiling, so some items ended up below the joists and our hand was forced.  If we had to do this again, perhaps we'd think more about the cleanup afterwards and try to get all the utilities in the cavities.

So, suspended it was.  The concept is fairly simple.  Just screw in a level bracket around the ceiling perimeter; fasten the main lines to the ceiling with wire, form up the squares or rectangles for the ceiling panels, and slap them in.  In practice, there were a few things to watch out for.

The perimeter border was fairly easy.  We chose the vinyl option because it's easier to cut and easier to screw into the wall when compared to metal.  The border is a 9/16 inch L bracket.  One side is screwed into the wall with drywall screws, forming a ledge to rest the celing grid upon.  The only odd thing we ran in to was that we had a air duct running into the room.  We could have drywalled around it, but that would have taken forever and wasn't worth it for this room.  So we were left with glueing the channel to the duct, or screwing into the duct itself.  Neither were very appealing and we ended up doing a bit of both, depending in what was easier.  

Once that was done, we had to hang the main lines from the ceiling joists above the room, making them level with the perimeter.  This was a little frustrating because you need to align the suspension wire connection points with the ceiling joists.  We had the joists running perpendicular to the mains, so we had a joists every 16 inches on center.  But the main line had a spot for the wire to run through it every two feet.  Thus, for an 8 foot main, it can be hung at foot 1 and 5, or 2 and 6, etc..  If I had to to this over again, maybe we'd run the main parallel to the joists.  In any event, that's step 2.

From there, the grid formation is basically an exercise in assembling a giant puzzle.  The pieces that connect two mains together to form squares or rectangles are called "T-s" and the ones we had were notched to snap securely to the mains.  Finally, the panels hit right in.

One final point-- don't get the cheapest panels you can find.  They tend to be rather fragile.  I got lucky in that I needed to cut many of them down anyway to make them fit along the perimeter, so I was able to cut off the crushed corners that plagued an entire box.  

Pictures to follow soon!

Posted by Caeli at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Basement Bedroom Suite Plan

As I mentioned in part 1, there is a no-man's land of wasted space between all these doors (into the bathroom, bedroom, small closet, and utility room).  That space is about to be put to very good use.

The wall that forms the basement stairway (and encloses the tiny closet) will be continued past the closet to the back wall of the house's foundation, broken only by one doorway.  Opposite this new wall, against the wall to the uitility room, I will build a closet or install storage cabinets.  This will form a short hallway, which has one door to the left entering the new bedroom suite, and one to the right entering the utility room. 

As you enter the bedroom, there will be a good-sized closet to the left.  It will have sliding doors, there isn't enough room for a walk-in nor does it need to be a walk-in closet since it is in its own dressing room.  The former tiny closet will be tucked into the right end of this new closet, a spot for shelves to tuck seldom-used items away.  The bathroom door stays where it is, the bedroom door also stays where it is.  There is a wall of about 3 feet between the two where a narrow dresser could go. 

With this new layout, I have multiplied the storage space and made the bedroom into a suite.  Yes, the children will need to go into that suite if they need to use the bathroom while they are playing in the basement playroom.  That is a small price to pay to have a really nice basement guest suite.

The floor will be wood laminate, I think we'll replace even the vinyl in the bathroom with it, for a seamless surface within the suite.  The ceiling of the bathroom is still drywall, but the rest of the suite will need to have a ceiling put in.  I like the look of the tin-ceiling style tiles.  You can get them in the nail-up panels or lay-in panels for a suspended ceiling grid system.  Here is one I think is pretty:

Since our kitchen plumbing and electrical wires are above that ceiling (and because we be installing central-vac piping through there eventually), we need to have a suspended ceiling. 

The egress window will have to wait for now, but it is on the required list of things to add in the future.  I have noticed several houses in our neighborhood have them, and I do not think we would want to risk our house being considered one bedroom short because of a window if we end up selling this house.  Besides, it is safer. 

Check back for more information about the progress on the basement remodel, especially the basement bedroom guest suite, and my plans for decorating it!

 

Posted by Caeli at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The basement of this house has presented a quandary since we first moved in.  It was a finished basement, supposedly.  But it was not really ready to be lived in.  The first thing that had to be done, even before we closed on the house, was to have a radon removal system installed (by the previous owner, a relocation company).  The granite bedrock around here makes radon problems common, and this house had been tested with an elevated level.  Presumably it is fine now, since there is a pipe under the foundation and a fan pulling out the poisonous radioactive gas so we will presumably not suffer cancer for living here. 

The basement had wall-to-wall carpeting throughout, except for the utility room and a recently installed bathroom (which includes a glass-walled shower).  The bathroom floor is vinyl.  The walls of the basement are drywalled, though we had to cut out and replace some of it when water damage caused some mold to form a colony there. 

The ceiling, except in the bathroom and the so-called bedroom, was suspended ceiling, with many canister lights.  Much of the ceiling (including the drywalled ceiling in the bedroom) has been taken down because of the kitchen remodel we did two summers ago. 

The kids' playroom takes up most of the basement.  The carpet was taken out (due to the mold) and replaced with some light-colored laminate flooring.  The walls are now a sunny yellow.  They had been painted with a barnyard theme mural but that was destroyed when we had to cut out the moldy drywall.  We have nailed in white beadboard paneling to the bottom third of the wall, and there will be chairrail above that.  Someday.  We also installed an entertainment center/toy storage system along one long wall.  It's not a bad space, when it's clean.

It is the bedroom area of the finished basement that has made us ponder and say "hmmm."  It is such an odd layout.  The bathroom is triangle shaped, and the hypotanus wall forms one of the bedroom walls, making that room into an elongated pentagon.  There is one tiny closet under the stairs.  In the middle of the doorways to the closet, bathroom, bedroom and utility room is this big open area of nothingness.  Because of the position of the doors, there isn't even a good spot to put in a closet, and we sure need more storage space. 

The bedroom has one tiny foundation window.  It should not even count as a bedroom without having an egress window, but the house was sold to us as a 4 bedroom home, including the basement bedroom.  

I think I have finally figured out what to do, however.  The question is, can we do it in time for my friend's upcoming visit?  She will be staying for several days and it would be great if she had her own private space, rather than ousting one of my kids out of their bedroom.  It will also be handy for my inlaws when they visit, also usually a several-day stay.  In the meantime, my husband uses that bathroom and keeps his clothes down there... in piles around the floor or crammed into that tiny closet.  It is time to do something and I have a plan that will create a gorgeous basement bedroom suite that will have me tempted to move into the basement.

More about my basement remodel bedroom suite plan.

Posted by Caeli at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The playroom in the basement has begun to be transformed, during the few hours here and there that my husband has found to work on it.  Here are some of the playroom photos of the process to date.

At the beginning of the adventure, this was the state of things in the playroom. 

As you can see, there used to be a farm mural in the playroom.  I painted the scenery and sky, and my mother painted the barn and details around it. 

My brother-in-law, with his weird sense of humor, painted this many-uttered Holstein cow (the brand is the Green Bay Packers logo, though that's hard to see here):

The kids had enjoyed playing in the farm playroom, but thanks to the water-dumping AC unit, we now had to rip apart one of the walls, even cutting out some of the studs, to get rid of mold.  So the mural had to go.

There had been chair rail around the room too, but now that was gone, and the bookshelves we had installed to hold the toys had been taken out, and the holes spackled.

The carpet was up, the fans and dehumidifier were on to dry out the concrete floor, which had been scrubbed with bleach water.

The next step was painting the walls.  Then white beadboard wainscotting was put on three of the walls (Georgia Pacific pre-finished stuff), and the subfloor material was put down over the concrete, the seams taped.  On the bottom was a plastic underlayment, Delta FL, which has dimples that allow room for moisture to drain should there be any wetness under the floor. 

 Then came a black felt underlayment, typical stuff for laminate floors.  Then the click-together laminate floor itself.  I had suggested we consider installing it at an angle, and although it isn't as straightforward nor as quick as installing the planks parallel to the wall, it gives the playroom a more updated feel, even perhaps more spacious-feeling. Hard to tell that from this picture with some of the playroom stuff finding it's way back into the room, but trust me.  Watch for future photos when we get it all done.

A hugely important part of this project was creating smarter storage for toys, books and games in the playroom.  Before, we had all open shelving.  We shelled out a chunk of change for utiltiy cabinet kits from Lowes (frustrating for their missing parts and poor directions, but not too bad looking in the end), and this is our new playroom storage system:

A flat-screen TV will go in the center, and with the addition of a comfy couch and some old armchairs we have in a back room, this will become a usable home theater, at least for the kids when they have friends over. 

So that is the basement playroom remodel as it stands right now.  We are simultaneously planning a remodel of our first floor, most importantly the kitchen remodel, so stay tuned for pictures of that remodeling project as it progresses. 

 

Posted by Caeli at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We were planning to remodel our basement, but not quite yet.

We bought our house with a finished basement - at least, they claimed it was finished.  It even looked finished, at first glance.  But since that time we have come to realize that we will probably have to do everything, except for the new bathroom (we hope), over.

We've lived here two years, and during that time, we've had water leak out of the air conditioner four times.  The HVAC is located in an unfinished utility room, just on the other side of what we have been using for our children's playroom.  One of the first projects I did after we moved in was paint a huge mural of a farm scene on three walls of this room.  One of the walls has now been saturated at least four times with water from the AC. 

The playroom (and most of the basement) is carpeted with a tan shag rug.  It has now been soaked through numerous times.  But this time was the worst.

This time, it seems that the air conditioner actually froze up, causing us to have the biggest puddle of water ever to seep through the wall and into the carpet, pad and concrete below.  It also spread out across the playroom floor, getting an expensive farm-design area rug wet, and ruining books and toys.

And, because we didn't catch it for who knows how many days because we have been so busy landscaping outside... all that wet stuff began to grow mold.  The whole basement stinks like mold.

If you aren't familiar with the problems mold can cause, they are primarily respiratory related. People can develop an allergy to mold, causing sinus and bronchial problems, and it is especially bad for people with asthma (like me).  And it's even worse for pregnant women (like me). 

So what can be done?  Well, the mold has to be removed.  I am not going to risk leaving even one spore of mold down there to be given the chance to multiply if ever the conditions are favorable again.  And we've done all we can to make sure this never happens again, namely by having the air conditioner repaired and recharged. 

But more importantly, we are going to remodel the basement correctly this time.  The previous owners did not use treated lumber for the floor plate of the stud walls.  They did raise the drywall high enough off the floor.  And they did not use a vapor barrier under the carpet.  Frankly, using carpet in the basement at all was a bad choice in and of itself. 

Here's what we (especially my DH) will do:

STEP ONE - MOLD REMOVAL

- Remove all carpeting and pad.

- Throw out furniture that got wet and/or mold on them (we don't have any pieces we really loved down there anyway)

- Cut off the part of the wall that got wet.  Drywall with mold growing on it has to be removed. The non-treated lumber bottom plates have to be replaced with treated, and so will any of the studs that got wet. 

- Scrub the floor with Spic-n-Span, and rinse (Spic-n-Span has no ammonia so it's safe to use in conjunction with the next step of mold removal)

- Scrub the floor with bleach water and allow it to stand wet for 15 minutes

- Dry the floor completely using dehumidifiers, fans, and all the AC vents open

STEP TWO - Remodeling the Basement Correctly

- Replace the wet wood and walls with new studs (little frames inside of the existing stud wall to replace the sections we cut out)

- Replace the drywall we removed

- Paint over my mural, since it's now pretty much ruined anyway.   This will mean a good coat of primer, and probably a couple coats of a nice warm gold color

- Install bead-board style paneling on the lower part of the wall as wainscoting.  Paint this white.

- Install white chair rail to finish this off.

- Install laminate floor using a vapor barrier which will go up the sides of the walls a couple of inches, hidden under the baseboards.

STEP THREE - FINISHING TOUCHES TO OUR CORRECTLY FINISHED BASEMENT

One of the reason we lost some of the kids' toys and books to the water and mold was that their playroom was horribly disorganized.  Even though we had installed lots of shelves, they didn't have an appreciation for where things were supposed to go, or that you should put things away when you're done with them.

In fact, they probably never play with 3/4 of their toys because they are sets that lost parts and pieces and don't work without them, etc. 

So this time, the playroom shelf system will be modified.  I want to put in stock cupboards from Lowe's or Home Depot, and install locks on them, to store the nicer games or sets of things (like dominoes), as well as kids arts and crafts supplies.  This way, I can control when the kids are allowed to have crayons and markers, in hopes of saving my newly painted basement walls.

I also want to move a table that is currently sitting in what is supposed to be our kitchen nook, to the basement.  It is an old, round oak table that was originally from a preschool, but in the nook it just gets covered with junk instead of being a good place for the kids to play and do art.  Hopefully in the basement it will give them a nice surface to play on, set puzzles, etc. 

Another strategy is to use lower cupboards to store toys.  If they cannot see so many toys at any given moment, maybe they won't take EVERYTHING out at once.  If necessary, we can lock these cupboards up too, and just leave a portion of their toys out on open shelves at any given time.  It'll be like Christmas when we take out a new batch of toys (meanwhile stashing away the ones that were out previously).

We are also going to install a TV on a bracket in the corner of the room, rather than having an entertainment center piece of furniture taking up space in there (and one less thing to worry about in case water ever does spill in there again).  All in all, this remodeled basement playroom will be brighter, less cluttered, have more kid-friendly furniture in it, and will be a safe place for the kids to play: mold-free!

Posted by Caeli at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)