1.04.2011

Basement Playroom Project Begins!

We making the final preparations to start our basement playroom project.  Last year we finished the unfinished portion of our new basement to add a guest room and bathroom, as well as a playroom.  Our kids love playing down there and we keep a good number of toys down there.  In the winter especially we use this room all the time which will hopefully push us to finish this project quickly!

As you can see in these pictures, we have some cheap laminate shelving leftover from our old basement (pre-renovation).  We needed book storage and fast and Ikea came through (of course).  After finishing the basement last winter, we reused these shelves for toys and books.  It was a great solution for the first year but now we have some time to create a more permanent solution.  As you can see, this space is seriously lacking organization!


 
We use this space for a lot of things - not just toys.  Our treadmill is here and we do actually use it so it's staying for now.  We also bought a flat screen TV from Amazon on Cyber Monday.  The TV is for the kids, running on the treadmill, exercise videos, and just as a secondary TV in the house.  We sold the large TV armoire and the tube TV in it on Craigslist before Christmas. 

The main component of this project will be new built-in bookshelves and cabinetry to store toys and books.  We have 3 sets of built-ins in our house now and I think these will be fairly similar.  I like to keep it consistent throughout the house although we may change up the doors this time around (as we have in the past).

Family Room

Living Room
Nursery
Hubby and I have spent the last 2 days planning out the bookshelves and how they will work with the space.  Here's roughly how we are coming out.  The new bookshelves are in orange.  More to come on the rest of the furniture layout. 

On the back wall, we are Jim is going to build cabinets below with doors, and the right wall will be floor to ceiling bookshelves with the television on the right side, also with shelves above and below.  I like that we will have both bookshelves and cabinetry easily accessible to the kids.  The biggest toys can go into the cabinet but the smaller stuff and boxes of toys like Legos and Barbies can go on the open shelves. 

Fortunately we are working with new construction unlike most of our previous projects.  Even so, progress won't be too fast because we have some busy weekends ahead but hopefully we can buy most of the supplies this week and get moving soon.  Lots more to come on this so stay tuned!