The New Playroom!

I’m a bad blogger.

A good blogger anticipates that when you do a new household project, you’ll eventually blog about it. A good blogger will take “before” pictures, “during” pictures, and “after” pictures, so that her readers can experience the whole thing with her.

Not a bad blogger. A bad blogger will remember to take pictures as she nears completion. Hi, hello, yes – that’s me (waving)!

But I will do my best to allow you to experience it all over with me.

We have a lovely, good-sized, 4 bedroom home. I say this not boastfully, but with gratitude. It really is a lovely home, and I am ever thankful to the Lord for providing it, and to my husband who works hard so that we can keep it. When we bought it, our third child was only 5 months old. It was really more space than we needed, but we figured that our family would grow into it.

And we did.

We’ve continually re-evaluated our use of space over the years, made little changes here and there, knocking out small walls, re-doing closets, etc. One thing that we always aimed to keep was a playroom. Every time we have tried to house toys in the kids’ bedrooms, we have found our house overrun by the toys. Really. Toys seem to have a mind of their own, and they take over. So, we have made it a general guideline that bedrooms are for sleeping, dressing, and reading. Toys are generally kept in the play room, and a few in the family room. As such, the four bedrooms have been utilized as follows:

• Bedroom 1: Parents’ Room
• Bedroom 2: Girls’ Room (accommodating 3 girls)
• Bedroom 3: Boys’ Room (accommodating 3 boys)
• Bedroom 4: Play Room (accommodating 2,738,492 toys, or so it seems!)

Now that Baby #7 / Boy #4 is coming along in a few months, we decided that we could really use that fourth bedroom as… well… a bedroom.

Therein lay the problem. I was reluctant to give up the playroom to become a bedroom, knowing the mass chaos and destruction that would soon follow.

A few possibilities were thrown around. Just to name a few:

1. Finish the basement
2. Add on a room to the back of our house
3. Put the dining room set in storage, and turn the dining room into a play room
4. Turn the living room into a play room and use our large-ish family room as our new living room
5. Just stick the toys in the kids’ room and deal with it

Well, adding a room was too expensive. Our dining room? That actually does get used pretty frequently. The living room? That would present some issues for our small group meetings which accommodate 9 adults and 17 children on a regular basis. Putting the toys in the kids’ room? Well… that’s already been mentioned. Remember? “Mass chaos and destruction.”

So option #1, finishing the basement, looked like our best choice. However, there were a few areas that needed to be addressed:

1. The mess. Our home does not have a lot of storage space, so the basement had become a drop-spot for a lot of junk stuff.
2. The plain, painted-wood stairs. We’ve been completely satisfied with these thus far, but the thought of children using them a great deal more frequently rendered them unsafe slipping hazards.
3. The floor, which was hard concrete, unsafe, and well… ugly.
4. The heat. We knew we’d be fine through the summer, but in winter (the time during which it would be used most frequently) it would be far too cold.

The Mess

The mess was addressed simply enough. The first step was cleaning it out, and purging a large amount of junk stuff through Craigslist, donations, and the garbage. The next step was purging a lot of junk stuff from other storage areas of our home, making room for the good junk the basement stuff that we decided to keep. This is the part that makes me happy to be a bad blogger, because I really would not want to share those pictures with you. The next step, which will be ongoing, will be the discipline to drop our future junk stuff in the designated storage areas as needed, instead of dropping them at the bottom of the basement stairs.

The Stairs

Then came the stairs. This was addressed quite easily as well. A trip to Trader Horn equipped us with a set of stair treads for about $10.

The Floors

The next step was the floor. I wanted it to be safe and… well… not ugly. The thought of sending the children to play in the no-natural-light basement seemed rather dark and dreary to me, akin to “banishing them to the dungeon.” I didn’t want to spend a fortune, but I did want it to be a cheerful, bright place where they could play together. As for safety, I had visions of our precious offspring developing concussions from falling onto the hard concrete floor. And what if they took a tumble off of the stairs? Shudder.

At this point I need to make note that while I am a bad blogger, I am not too bad of one, because I went to take a picture of our laundry room floor just so that you can get an idea of what our basement floor looked like beforehand. See? I’m smaht like that (tapping my temple).

There you have it. Dark, dreary, cold, and full of a host of hazards.

Anyhow, we started where most people start. We looked into getting carpet. Carpeting is expensive both to purchase and install. This was one area that we did not trust ourselves in a DIY project, due to the carpet needing stretched, etc. This was not something we were experienced with nor equipped for, and not something we were particularly interested in learning to become experts in. Unsure of whether we wanted to spend a good portion of our housing budget on carpet, we continued to explore other options.

I next learned about an interesting product called “carpet tile.” The upside to carpet tile was the ability to install it ourselves. The downside was the still-hefty price, at least to get a nice quality tile. Still, it looked like a good possibility.

Then one day while shopping at SAMS Club, we happened upon some packages of Util-A-Mat, which are foamy-rubbery-type floor mats that hook together like puzzle pieces. One side of the mats are made in bright, primary colors, and they can also be flipped over to be used in a charcoal gray color. They are frequently used in preschools, or even in garages to protect tools from breaking when they fall on the floor.  It took about five minutes for us to decide to buy them. In my  purse, I just happened to have our handy-dandy basement diagram, complete with carefully calculated dimensions, so we tossed a few packages of Util-A-Mat into our cart, and were on our way. For less than $200 we were able to cover our entire basement floor, providing our children with exactly what I had hoped for: a fun, cheerful, bright, wonderfully-padded place to play.

The Heat

Here things got a little more tricky. We looked at a number of heating options: electrical space heaters, woodstoves, baseboard heaters, etc. The answer to this issue was made very clear last week when our A/C died. As I mentioned in that earlier post, both our A/C and furnace were original to our house, about 27 years old, and on their last legs. When the A/C went, we made the decision to purchase both appliances together. The new furnace is much stronger and more efficient than our old one, and has the ability to handle the heating of an additional room. At this point, we need only to open up a few ducts in our basement to make our playroom ready for our kids to use when the cold weather sets in. Not exactly a “frugal” choice, but when you consider that it was necessary anyhow, it was not a frivolous one either.

A few more pictures:

See this wall? This will soon be covered with a few coats of magnetic primer, topped once again with white paint, then used as a fun way to display the children’s artwork with magnets. And the big doorway opening into the laundry room? This will soon be covered with either a door, a baby gate, or a temporary sheet.

Below is a video projector that we got for FREE a few years ago when Iron Man’s company was getting rid of it. They were actually going to throw it in the trash (what were they thinking???) until Iron Man asked if he could have it. Up until now, we have projected movies and video games onto the wall shown above (the soon-to-be-magnetic-wall). Now that said wall will be blocked with toy shelves and children’s artwork, we needed a new area to project onto.

Voila! Look above the steps at the curtain-like fabric draped across the ceiling. What you see here are two old sheets, one behind another for thickness, stapled to the ceiling, and being held up by clothesline rope. When we need to use the screen, we just have to untie the rope to release the sheets! This has been tested and used several times already.

This picture was taken from the laundry room. You have a good view of our lockers, which were found on Craigslist a few years ago. My mother purchased these for us as a sanity-saving gift when I was pregnant with George, and these lockers are truly a large family’s dream! You can also see the wooden shelf in the corner, which houses a number of kids’ videos and a video game system. Finally, you can see the children’s seating arrangements: large, round floor pillows, found on Overstock.com. They are wonderful! Each has a nice, thick, duck-cloth cover, which can be unzipped and removed for washing. I love the bright and cheery look and feel of them.

I think the kids do too!

Updated pictures will come soon, when our magnetic wall is finished, and when the toys are moved into the room!

Update: Want to see the final results? Read the update here!

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