Playroom Redo--Part 1

One of the rooms that has been driving me nuts since we moved in was the playroom. I felt like it was always a mess and it was a bit bland for a play room. We had purchased some baskets for toys, but it still felt really disorganized. I wanted to get it organized and spice it up a bit to make a fun room for the Little One! Here's a couple horrible quality before pictures of the playroom. I really need a wide angle lens...
We love this nice built in unit! It packs a ton of storage! I really don't like the red desk top, though. It's just not my style.

Here you can sort of see the windows and the curtains the previous owner left. They're nice, but again, not my style. 

Toys line the walls. 

I had such a hard time taking pics of this room without a wide angle lens. I may just use my phone next time. I think I was holding the camera above my head to get the shot below. Oh brother. But you get the jest. 

Part one of our little makeover was organizing. We usually rotate the toys so Little One doesn't get bored with them, but since moving, we had kind of slacked off on that. For those of you wondering, we don't have a complicated system or anything. We mainly rotate the big toys and a basket or two of little toys. We don't have enough space to have all of his toys out at one time, plus when there's too many toys out at once, he gets overwhelmed and just carries the toys around and doesn't play with anything. Silly kid! So one rotation may look like just putting the ball blower, toy vacuum, and the basket of blocks away and bringing out a different large toy like the shopping cart and one of the baskets of cars. I usually swap out a few of the stuffed animals, too. His train set stays out all the time, though. ;)

Now, back to the organizing...I dumped all the toys out of the baskets and put the ones that he hasn't played with in a while in the guest room. Then, I organized the remaining toys by type into the baskets and got them all put back on the shelves.
Here's a bunch of the smaller toys. The bigger ones didn't even make it into the picture. Crazytown.

After. Not that impressive, but it's a start!

After the toys were taken care of, I took everything out of the cabinets and organized it all into plastic baskets I had on hand. Yes, more baskets left over from my classroom! When I ever go back to teaching and need the baskets back, my house is going to fall apart! Haha! :) I'm not crazy about how the baskets look through the glass, but they were free so I stuck with it. I'm thinking of putting up a cute fabric behind the glass panes to hide the contents of the cabinets.

Last but not least, I just tried to neaten up the bookshelf area. I'm having the worst time getting the bookshelf to not look like a mess. The books are more spread out then I'd like because the shelves bow when they are full of books. Any suggestions on making bookshelves look neater and prettier?


Here's our plans for the rest of the room:

-Organize the closet and make room for toys. We would like to store the toys that we rotate in this closet instead of lugging them to the spare bedroom.

-Paint the walls. I have big plans for a striped accent wall. :)

-Take off the door. It is in the way and we never use it.

-Paint the countertop or replace it.

-Hang fun artwork.

-Hang frames to put Little One's artwork in.

-New curtains or blinds.

-Purchase a rug.

-Build a long bench with storage cubbies. I really want to get an Ikea Expedit for this, but we don't have Ikea in town and by the time you drive hours to get there and hours back, we might as well just build one ourselves. Frown. We SO need an Ikea here.

Stay tuned--I've been busy painting! Will share pics soon!