The New & Improved Playroom

My favorite kind of Christmas break — a productive one. The painters finished up in the basement a couple of days before Christmas, so we spent December 26th and 27th making the basement into a playroom. I'm super happy with the results. It was a dark and kind of depressing place before, but the lovely shade of yellow added like a thousand watts of light down there and now it's a really pleasant place to be.

Also, I love that we made use of what we already had. We ended up buying very little to pull this room together. I did more reducing, reusing and recycling in this room than I've ever done on a house project before. The playroom basically became a receptacle for most every thing Ikea we've collected over the years. Here's a tour of the new space:


TV Corner
We used a locker, clock and silver frames salvaged from my husband's company before he was a professor — all from Ikea. (Look at our ancient TV. When are we going to upgrade already?) You might recognize the gorgeous artwork that my children made this past summer.


Sofa Bed
This is where we spent about half our funds. We already owned the Ikea PS sofa bed. We picked ours up about 3 years ago. I love the profile. I love the oversize wheels. But the original cover was in bad shape and looked too pale against the yellow wall. So we bought a new dark denim sofa cover and lots of throw pillow covers to spruce things up. The new cover and cushions came to about $120.



Kitchen Nook
You remember the darling freecycled chairs, right? And the tables are part of this Ikea Svala set. They were our first Ikea purchase when we moved to NY and have stayed nice and sturdy for over 6 years. (The chairs that came with the set are being used upstairs in another space.) The tables had been painted blue and were looking quite worn, but a coat of red paint (I used some leftover paint from another project) made them look like new again.

Note the stripey panel on the wall. That is a fabric covered piece of homasote that makes a giant bulletin board. I'm putting the photos together that will be displayed there this week. I'll post about it when I'm done.


The sweet kitchen play set was delivered by Santa this year. He picked it up at Target. It's just the right size for a small space.



Shelving/Computer Space
The shelving is called Ivar and is also from Ikea. We've had it for ages but have never used it in this formation before. The red desk chair was picked up on the side of the road on our neighborhood trash day (it's one of 4). The curtain hanging (on the doorway to the laundry room) is the same fabric we used on the bulletin board. The fabric was actually a 2-pack curtain panel set, $30 from Ikea.


I love this signed print from Sarah Jane. Isn't it just right in a playroom?


The Flooring
The original flooring is a dark and cold ceramic tile. Sort of a brownish/reddish/blackish mix. Not pretty. So we decided to cover it with something that would be more welcoming and more friendly to bare feet. But the basement has been known to flood occasionally, so I wanted some kind of covering that was inexpensive, so that if it was ruined I wouldn't care. Plus, we're renters, so I didn't want to invest too heavily in the space. I ended up deciding on rag rugs. We intended to use them across the entire floor, but then I saw these larger solid cotton rugs and thought they would help define the two main areas of the space, so we just used the rag rugs around the edges of the room. All the rugs were purchased at Ikea and the total cost was under $150.

Two days of work. Less than $300. Hooray for a fresh new space!

Edit — Readers have been asking, but I don't have any real "before" shots of the space. So, I've pulled together a few swatches of some of the old materials after looking through my archives on iphoto:


Weird grayish, faux wood paneling on the ceiling and covering the pipes. The pink/mauve shade shown on the pipe covered the stairs and appeared other places as well. The floors were (still are under the rugs) this dark ceramic tile. The walls are wide wood paneling — which I probably could have worked with in a room with windows, but this basement was just too dark for such old, sad materials.