Big Girl Room {Moodboard}

It's been awhile since I've shared a moodboard of a space I'd like to design, so I thought I'd share a little glimpse of what I'd like to do for our baby girl in a few years. You know, since she's not even born yet (10 weeks left!) and will at first need a crib and changing table.

I'd like to start with soft gray walls and use a mix-and-match set of antique-ish furniture I refinished years ago and is usually our guest room furniture. It includes a double bed that will get a pin tucked up-grade, a vanity and tall dresser.

Next, I'd like to layer in the pink or something equally girly. I think I've shared before that if I had had a baby girl first I wouldn't do much pink. But since I've had three boys first, PINK it up! Of course there needs to be a girly, pretty light fixture too!

I like the chevron rug in contrast with the pink frilly bedding. White accessories go great with the white dresser and vanity. Both pieces have dark wood tops, and the bed frame is natural wood as well. An old trunk or hope chest would be a great place for treasures, or just extra bedding.

Isn't the dollhouse/book case cute? I'd love to find an old doll house and fix it up, or have Gary make one for our little girl.

A few weeks ago I shared my Baby Girl Nursery Moodboard. I didn't use all the same pieces, but my intention is to have much of the same art, dresser and rug be the same. Who else is loving pink and gray and white?

It's so fun to dream, even if it's still a couple years off!

Jonathan's Room, Revisited

One good thing about moving frequently is that you get to a place where you just unpack a room's (or person's) belongings in the new place and it looks pretty familiar.

Such is the case with Jonathan's room in this house. Other than trying out a million configurations to make his furniture fit comfortably, this room is virtually the same as his last room.

This room will double as the guest room in this house like it did at the last house, and it's another case of using what we have. I like Jonathan's room, I love the furniture and the bright blue is one of his favorite colors, but if I were to design a room just for him, this wouldn't be it. I'm sure most of us living in reality face situations like that quite often!

The quilt on this antique double bed is from the Better Homes & Gardens collection at Walmart. I refinished the bed about 5 years ago and it just so happens to be the most comfortable bed in the house!

I keep the extra sheets and blankets for this bed in the top half of the dresser and Jonathan's clothes in the bottom half. The dresser and vanity are something I refinished--rescued, I like to call it, as they were freebies destined for the dump! I love how they turned out, but they've gotten more dings and scratches than I like to see from our recent moves.

I changed a few things on the top of the dresser. Now his CD player is safe from little brothers! Jonathan loves to listen to Bible stories during his quiet time every day, and sometimes during play time too.

The vanity is virtually empty for now. I used my sewing table in our classroom for my desk things, and just stacked the rest of my scrapbook supplies in the closet. Future organizational project!

I think this desk, as it's being used for a 6-year-old boy, looks funny crammed in the corner, but there was no where else for it to go.

Between the closet (not pictured) and the door to the hall is a small wall where I put this display.

Under it is a small white bookshelf with a few of Jonathan's trinkets mingled with my book collection and some old children's books.

On top is a special parking lot for emergency response vehicles. Jonathan loves these, especially because most have sirens!

Jonathan's room at this house is right beside the classroom and right down the hall from the living room and kitchen. The boys all play in there a lot, as the Lego bin lives under the bed!

On this day, they were just getting started--see only a few Legos scattered around? You should see the amazing cars, planes, helicopters,  houses, prisons, and castles these boys make!

I love to look down the hall and see all three boys playing together, usually quite nicely.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great day!

Our Classroom {Tour}

We did it.

Something we've been planning on and meaning to do for awhile, but life has been full of moving and changes, plus I didn't feel like my son was ready to start before.

Start what? SCHOOL!

Homeschool to be exact.

Let me tell you, I have a lot to learn about the whole homeschool world, but my background as an educator and my experience teaching Kindergarten has helped immensely! For now I'm kinda making things up, but we do something with numbers and something with letters every day, we read a lot, and most days we get to do something fun and creative and messy!

Ok, this is supposed to be about our classroom. When we were looking for a rental home here, it wasn't even on our list of needs. There's always the kitchen table, right? Well, this house has three bedrooms. Two are upstairs, one is downstairs. Since none of them had an attached bathroom or a bigger closet, there was no obvious way to assign rooms to members of our family.

This house also has a big bonus room in the basement. If you took the tour earlier this week, you saw that it's nicely carpeted and painted and the placement of the windows is the only clue that you're in a basement. Initially we thought that would be a great playroom/classroom, but the more we thought about it, the more it became clear that the bigger bedroom upstairs should be the classroom. It would fit into the pattern of our daily lives better if we were upstairs, it had closets to store books and art supplies, and Gary and I could use the bonus room as a bedroom.

So we did.

This table and chairs is the only furniture we bought. It was $30 off of craigslist. It's not perfect, but that is what makes it perfect for our classroom! I'm not going to get upset if it gets crayons, glue, paint, etc. on it.

The classroom is also our playroom, so our toy bins are here. We've really purged the toys in our recent moves and in preparation for the big move overseas, so there's not a whole lot here. It's a great space during school time for the younger boys to play with something while I work one-on-one with Jonathan. Jared likes to be included with school work too, so a lot of the time, Josiah plays on his own.

I'm really focusing on hanging the boys' artwork here. It's their space. And their art is usually colorful! I think it's a great way to add some interest to the large blank spaces on the walls. Below are three canvasses that each boy painted when they were very small.

My mom sent us this ABC poster. The colors and pictures are perfect for our classroom! I think she got it at her dollar store--the best dollar store ever, seriously!

Above is a larger canvas that I helped Jonathan fingerpaint when he was about 13 months old. It was a Father's Day gift to Gary and hung in his office at work until he quit the whole Corporate America thing.

Below you'll notice the paintstrip art I had hanging in our guest room in Ohio and moved to the hall when Jonathan moved into the guest room. I still love it, and it's fun how the colors match so well! Didn't plan that!

This bookshelf keeps popping up everywhere, doesn't it? Anyone remember where they've seen this shelf that my dad made? It was in Jonathan's nursery in our first house in Iowa, in Jared's nursery in our second house, moved to the closet nook in Josiah's nursery, then was in Jonathan's room in Ohio. Now it's a happy part of our classroom in Nebraska!

We use this train table for trains. And sorting manipulatives, doing puzzles, an extra space for someone to do larger art projects, well, you get the idea.

This second ABC chart was something I picked up at Michael's right after public school started here, so it was really cheap! I couldn't pass up the matching calendar either! This calendar set up is something I always did in my Kindergarten classroom, and it's a great way to learn numbers, days of the week, months of the year, etc.

Seeing that we're renting, I just used poster putty to hang all of the charts. Then I used thumbtacks to hang twine along the bottom of the ABC charts. We use tiny clothespins (found at Walmart) to display the boys' projects.

This last corner of the room is all for Mommy! I finally have a place where my sewing table fits perfectly! I've already used it too! My sewing table is an heirloom, though not worth much monetarily, it's of huge sentimental value. My Grandpa, a cabinet maker, built this table to my Grandma's specifications, taking into consideration her sewing habits, where she wanted her supplies, even her height. Unfortunately, Grandma was several inches taller than me, so sitting here isn't super comfortable, but oh well!

This old map is from a National Geographic collection a friend gave me when I papered the boys' old room in Iowa with maps. It has the US on one side and the world on the other. I had it with the world shown, but it had the USSR, so I thought maybe it would be fun to mark the places in the US that we've traveled to.

The baskets on the right side are for my boys' school work. It's an easy way to keep their things organized. I can go through the baskets later and decide what to keep. The basket on top holds jars of sewing supplies, mostly my Grandma's. The wonky basket on the left is there to try to hide the modem and wireless router for our internet! 

My "every child is an artist" sign hasn't fared too well in the moves. I think it'll be fine once I find and re-glue the clothespins.

How about some before and after shots?

So even though we weren't looking for a house that had a space we could use for a classroom, it turned out perfectly! We use this space every day--even on weekends because it doubles as a playroom.

What about you? Do you homeschool? Do you have a designated space for it? How about a place where your kids do homework or get creative? Or a playroom? We've never had one of those and I really like it!

Thanks for taking the tour!

Divide and Conquer

Remember when I first showed you our guest room in our rental home in Ohio? Remember how we ended up changing it to be our 6-year-old's room? Remember how I said it is also where I store my craft supplies and it can easily accommodate guests? Yeah, it's time to see how all that works.

First up, let's review how this room fills the needs of the little dude who lives here. Jonathan sleeps here at night, plays quietly here at rest time, and changes his clothes in the morning and evening. That means he needs a bed,

 
a few toys and books,

places for his clean and dirty clothes,

and a smattering of things around the room to make it feel like it's HIS.

 Next, let's look at where I store my craft supplies.

Jonathan uses one drawer in the desk and I get the rest. I keep some scrap book supplies here like my cutters and pens. I will sometimes use the desk or the bed for a quick project, like hot-gluing a frame back together, or cutting down a paper to the right size. But if I were to really tackle a project, I would take my supplies to the dining room table.

I keep papers and stickers in the top half of the dresser and Jonathan uses the bottom half. One basket on top of the dresser has ribbons and things in it, while the small basket with the puppy is for our little boy's treasures he's always finding--rocks and feathers and such.

I keep the rest of the scrap book supplies as well as other miscellaneous crafty things in these boxes in the closet which leaves plenty of space for Jonathan's dress clothes to hang and for his dirty laundry bin on the floor.

Oh! I almost forgot, I keep wrapping paper in long, flat bins under the bed! I've done that for years and love it. When I need to wrap a present I usually pull out the needed bin (one for birthdays, one for Christmas) and either wrap the present on the floor or on the bed. Some day I'll have a cute wrapping station, but for now, this totally works. (Sorry no picture!)

Ok, so next is how this room would work as a guest room! We haven't needed it as such since Jonathan moved in, but we would only need to change a few things to make a guest feel comfortable here.

This picture is from before I moved the collage on the wall out to the hall. (You can see that here!) But it shows a well-made bed with different pillows that are only for guests.

There is room for hang-up clothes in the closet and the chair can be placed between the bed and dresser to act as a luggage rack. Of course there would be a stack of fresh towels for our guest and anything else they might need.

As to where a certain little boy would sleep, he is already looking forward to "camping" in his brothers' room!

What about you? Do you have a dedicated guest room that no one else uses? Do your guests share a room with a member of your family, or does someone move out for them? We're looking forward to hosting a guest or two in the near future!