I think Cate's room has given me more grief than any other in my house. The problem is two fold. Number one, it's a pretty small room. Number two, she is my messiest kid.
Not a swell combo.
So.
Just to remind you, here's how the bed looked before.
It wasn't always so messy but this was taken during a clean up session.
There wasn't enough floor space for her to play and her storage was awkward. One of her major toys is 18" dolls which come with all sorts of paraphernalia and we were storing it in drawers under the bed but it was just too tricky for her to pack it all in and get it put away properly.
I thought through a lot of possibilities but as you know, at the end of January I caved and bought a loft bed. Which she quickly took over.
This was my starting point. Once we cleaned up her wall of dresses (GAH) we needed to make the best use possible of the new floor space and to figure out sensible storage.
I replaced her tiny dresser, which was storing toys, with this shelf. I decided the key was to think up...higher, taller storage to use more upper real estate and leave the floor clear.
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I wanted tall bins so bought garbage cans from Dollarama and added sticky chalk board labels.
(Yes there's more than an ipod in there...charger, headphones, etc.)
Next I moved her dresser and gave her one spot for everything baby, 18" doll and Build a Bear.
They all wear the same clothes and use the same toys so now it's all together in one spot.
And more importantly, it all fits. The scooter and bike were too hard for her to squeeze into the under bed drawers. Now they just pop back on the shelf.
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And in the drawer...every shoe, shirt, bottle, spoon, hair bow or crutch
is easy to throw in at clean up time.
Hmmm. Tic tacs...how do those belong in there???
Busted!
I painted the dresser and gave it new knobs and then set it up under the bed along with Cate's kitchen stuff. We added another shelf to store kitchen supplies and stuffies.
We gave her a shelf up by her bed for storing her devotional and books and of course where her precious elf Jack sleeps in his groovy girl sleeping bag.
He was a birthday gift I arranged for Cate from Santa.
The first mission to add more floor space has been accomplished.
And the second mission to provide sensible storage that
Cate can keep tidy is working out so far as well.
Which is not to say that I don't have to keep on her daily to put away little bits of this and that...it is an ongoing training but now she is better able to figure out what goes where and do it herself.
In the hallway outside her room where the kitchen stuff had been, I added a book shelf because the wall shelves were overflowing. We needed more book storage.
Now let me be very clear here.
The loft bed was a very last resort for me. I do not like them as a rule and I do not like this one at all. It is ugly and is a huge pain (literally on my feet) to try to tuck a kid into and she will grow out of it eventually. I only got it because in this particular space I could not make any other options work to give Cate room to play and good storage and in the end I decided that as the youngest with the most toys and a love of play still she really deserved to have a spot that worked. But in general, I would try hard to avoid a loft bed.
Finally I want to give a big shout out to the Gersby bookcase from Ikea.
It has a teeny footprint which is very useful and is, that's right, $29!!
Yay Ikea!
