Welcome to Heardmont

You guys! I’m so excited to share our finished playroom with you!  If you recall, when we saw our house for the very first time, this room in the front was set up as a formal living room.

We decided it was officially “the playroom” shortly after moving in. Over time, we added more toys and storage, but certain elements never worked. Most recently, the room looked like this.

And here’s the finished playroom today!

The first updates we made were to cover the semi-gloss tan walls with light gray paint and to replace the barely functional blinds with new roller shades. The paint color alone helped tremendously to lift the mood of this room.

Next, we removed the bookshelves and added these amazing, hide-everything white cabinets. I added the wooden top to really finish off the look and am so glad Stephen convinced me to keep it natural instead of staining it darker.

That natural and white basket is perfect for our wooden train set, and you might recognize the wall hanging I shared recently. We resisted at first, but it’s safe to say princess fever has taken hold at our house, so I made the girls’ dress up clothes easily accessible on the wall hooks beside the cabinets (for spontaneous dance parties!).

On the opposite wall is the play kitchen. This was a consignment sale find that Stephen and I fixed up for Christmas last year, and both girls love it! I also framed a few art pieces Libby made with finger paints and poster board. I love seeing kids’ art in homes, and I think framing these pieces really elevated their look.

The play table and chairs fit perfectly under the windowsill and don’t block the light like the old chalkboard did. The girls love sitting here to work on crafts, have snacks, and watch the trash truck go by.

So there you have it, a formal living room turned playroom that still looks nice enough to greet guests. I am loving the closed storage and all the little projects that went into making this room a fun place for our two ladies.

Sources

Wall color – Silver Drop by Behr
Roller shades – Home Depot
Cabinets and doors – Ikea/ Ikea
Cabinet top – Lowes
Pig bookends – CB2 (similar, similar)
Natural and white basket – Hobby Lobby (similar, similar)
Wall hanging – DIY here
Frames for DIY art – Ikea Ribba
Play kitchen – consignment (similar, similar, similar)
Play table – consignment (similar)
Dress up hooks – Ikea
Cloud pillow – Ikea

Some links in this post are affiliate links.

It’s taken awhile, but we’re finally starting to find our groove with this house. We’ve moved around a lot of furniture in the two years we’ve been here, and one space that stumped us for a long time is what the builder of this house probably called the formal living and dining room. These are the first two rooms you see when you enter the house. Here’s how they looked when we saw our home for the first time.

And this is how the space looked right after we bought the house. The white door you see here is our front door, so those windows face our street. I immediately knew we’d be replacing the window treatments and painting the walls, but those changes took a lot longer to achieve than I hoped!

This home had two living areas but no dedicated playroom. We originally thought we’d use the sunken den as a play area, but at the time our oldest was just learning to walk and couldn’t manage the split level stairs down to the den on her own. Now that’s the case for her little sister! Since this formal living room was on the main living floor, it became the playroom by default.

Here’s a photo I found that shows how we initially set up the space. We anchored those bookshelves to the long wall and began filling them up. For awhile, we placed our books on the top shelves and toys filled the lower ones.

I eventually found a second chair for the space and later replaced the pile of pillows (fun while it lasted!) with an end table between the chairs.  This was about a year ago. Notice the window treatments and wall color hadn’t changed yet!

I’ll write soon about adding seating in our dining room on the other side of this space. When we made that change, we were able to remove the adult chairs in the photo above and replace them with a wooden shelf, kid-sized chair, and chalkboard. I also finally took down the previous owner’s cornice boards and started thinking about paint colors.

We liked having our books on display and a place for toys, but those open shelves always ended up looking messy. As the girls got taller, it was harder and harder to keep them from pulling heavy books off the upper shelves that were supposed to be off limits.

The wooden shelf under the window created a sort of window seat and good storage for stuffed animals, but again, it always looked messy. I also didn’t love how the chalkboard blocked the window, and the blinds were in terrible shape and hard to operate.

Here was our plan for the space!

First, the walls had to go lighter. The girls loved the play kitchen, so it had to stay. We decided replacing the bookshelves with closed storage would go a long way towards keeping the room looking tidy. I also wanted to bring in some texture with new roller blinds, a DIY wall hanging, baskets, and colorful art.

So how did it all turn out? Stay tuned – I’ll be sharing the after photos of this room very soon!