We have a lot of kids and a lot of stuff. We are mindful of going through toys a few times a year and getting rid of what they don’t use, but truly they are at a stage where they are using the majority of it. You won’t find an immaculate, Pinterest award-winning, professionally designed home here. Instead, you will find a home where kids are free to play, create, imagine, learn, and grow to their hearts’ content.
We love creating unique spaces for the kids to engage in different activities. We have many common areas where we hang out: the art center, school room, playroom, living room, kitchen, etc. They literally play everywhere. However, we quickly learned that sometimes we just have too much togetherness, and it’s nice to have your own special space to head to in order to change things up a bit or find a little respite.
We’ve had so much fun using every nook and cranny to create more usable space within our home.
I’ve never been a big hang-your-clothes-in-the-closet kind of person. I usually just hang the nice stuff. Granted, that leaves a lot of extra usable space. However, even before kids, when we’d look at homes that had a large master closet, my first thought was always, “That could be an office.”
So the very first step when we remodeled the playroom was to create a reading nook. The kids love having a quiet cozy space tucked away from all of the toys where they can just chill and read a book. My 10-year-old still squeezes his way in there occasionally.
The next area we created in our son’s big boy room is a desk area. He will sometimes go in there to do his schoolwork, and often he uses that extra space to sort baseball cards, write creative stories or work on his sudoku and crossword puzzles.
The twins’ room perfectly houses a dollhouse, Barbies, and a whiteboard. Think about that for a second; it keeps that mess of a million dolls and pieces contained! They feel like they’re going into an entirely different room and love it.
Over the summer, I got into a Home Edit kick and redid the master closet. Once I saw how much space I created, I decided to make another nook for our youngest child. She loves having her own space to go play away from all of the “loud big kids.” I plan to put a comfy reading chair and rug there someday, but right now I know I won’t have the time to go sit in there anyways, so why not let her use the space?
Along with being not-using-closets-for-clothes people, we are also people who don’t use garages for cars. We apparently just don’t have that skill set! During quarantine, we noticed how often our kids tend to play in the garage. It was rather gross really, since our garage is our main dumping ground of crap when we walk in the door. Rather than having them sit on the dirty floor, we ended up making them a little play area in there as well. I can see this becoming a teen hang out with a ping-pong table or something when they’re older. My next project is a workout area for my husband and me to use on the other side of the garage.
So yes, we have a lot of stuff, but while our kids are learning and growing, we want to give them many comfortable and inspiring places to do that. I’m sure once we give in to the video game stage we will find ourselves with TONS of extra nooks and crannies, but for now we just like letting them have their fun spaces.
