Wow, it’s been almost a month since my last post….sorry about that. It’s been a really full month of trying to get back to “normal”…whatever that is. We were also preparing for a late Birthday party for Creative Kid that we held just a few days ago. So while I was trying to get back to normal ways of life when it came to homeschool, cooking, schedules, etc…I was also trying to throw a party together, the first party at our new house. Whew, it was a lot.
As far as the house goes, we’re still not there yet with putting away everything. We have about 4 rooms that still have boxes in them: the craft studio, the gaming loft, the office/guest bedroom and there’s a bit in the great room. The great room has things that need to be organized into what I planned to be built ins on either side of the fireplace. I’m now getting antsy though and looking into other alternatives as I’m tired of living out of boxes or not having our electronics set up properly and having cords everywhere. I’ve seen some beautiful Ikea hacks to make the built in look I am wanting, the only downside is that all the hacks I have fallen in love with include a panel door that Ikea no longer offers. ☹ So I am on the fence. Here’s an example of what I fell in love with….it will take some effort on our part to do the touches that require it to look built in but we can do this ourselves at a fraction of the cost of actually having build ins done and we can get it accomplished much quicker.
Obviously we have the fireplace with TV over it in the middle, but the side pieces are pretty close to what I am looking to do on either side. We need space at the bottom to conceal and organize the TV’s peripherals (DVR, game systems, remote system and charger, antenna, DVDs, etc), places in the middle that are open for books and a few knick knacks or pictures and space at the top for display. Right now we are using a small end table for the hooked up peripherals and everything else is in boxes.
Moving on to my craft studio and it is just boxville right now. There is nothing I can do in there, in fact it is so full I haven’t even been able to put up these new curtains I bought for the room, which I love.
The room needs all new organizational stuff since we don’t want to put up the shelving we had at our old house. Again I’m looking at Ikea for this organization and have some idea of what I need, but our large SUV has been on the fritz again (long story for another post someday) and it’s the one we have to use to pick up large items from Ikea, so we haven’t made any progress here. I plan to remedy that issue this month though because I could use some creative time to de-stress. As a SAHM who homeschools, I get very little time to focus on myself or my own pursuits and haven’t for the better part of a year and a half once we started the journey to sell our house and build our dream house…I need that outlet.
The gaming loft is a mix of furniture we already have and organizational furniture we need. We have furniture to sit on up there as well as an end table/coffee table set, but all of our board games and console game systems are still sitting in boxes. Ikea will be getting more of our money for that organization (see a theme?) but I’m still struggling with the layout to get everything to fit properly.
The office/guest room has gotten a bit of office furniture this past month. We purchased a desk and chair for Richard as this room will primarily be used as a home office when he needs to work from home. As you can guess, the desk came from Ikea. It is a Hemnes desk in black/brown.
We’re on the fence with what to use for the guest bed in this room. The room is not a huge room and we rarely have guests so we don’t want a bed that will take up a bunch of floor space when not in use, which leads us to thinking we will buy a Murphy bed or some sort of convertible couch. Right now I think we are leaning towards something like this for now. It’s a convertible couch that also has storage for us to put the bedding in for when it’s pulled out.
Long term though I think I want to get a nice Murphy bed that looks like a bookcase when not in use because the mattress would be better and it would take up less floor space. Something like this:
Now for some things we have gotten accomplished in the last month. I’ve started buying curtains! I was on the fence with what type of blinds I would want and decided that regardless I will want curtains to add personality to the room. I started first in Creative Kid’s room because I didn’t want him to wake up early after the time change because sun was coming in his window. His was a pretty simple choice because of the bright color of his room. He chose red walls and said he wanted a Lego/Lego Ninjago theme. We still need to buy vinyl decals for his wall to finish pulling the theme together, but his room ended up being big enough to put our big Lego table and Lego organizer in his room, so that helps. We went out and purchased some Ikea Kallax organizers for all of his toys and bought the bins for them in red and grey to match his room and then went with a red and white striped curtain with a blackout liner. It’s coming together but a little more cleanup and organizing needs to happen as all the new fabric bins need labels for CK to keep them straight. Now to re-sort all of the Legos into the proper bins. ?♀️
You’ve already seen the desk we put in the office and other than arranging existing furniture and setting up our drum set, not much else has been done upstairs. Downstairs though is 80-90% put away. The kitchen is all put away and we bought these bar stools for our eat ledge counter. We really fell in love with these bar stool and got home and realized they were a little on the high side for our counter, but since we can’t find any others that we like we’ve decided to keep them for now. If we eventually find some others that we love that are the right height, we will simply move these to another area as we plan to do a finished basement eventually and have talked about a bistro type table for playing simple games on in the sun room possibly. One way or another, they will just be re-purposed if we find other bar stools for the kitchen counter.
Moving on to other rooms downstairs, in the dining area right now has our old table. Our old table is fairly solid still even though it’s going on 18 years old, but it’s a light honey oak color and doesn’t match anything in the new house and some of the chairs are starting to break, especially the spindles on the backs of the chairs. We plan to buy a new table and had planned to have one made either via a carpenter or an Amish furniture company because most furniture stores do not sell tables that are solid wood…they all seem to be laminate these days. However, we have really warmed up to this table we found that is made of Acacia wood that we think would look lovely in the room. I’m not a fan of the chairs though and will be looking for padded chairs if we go this table.
In the sunroom we have our old leather couch with plans to buy new furniture in the future. I had picked out a wicker set at one point but I no longer like that look. We haven’t had a chance to focus on what we would really like in there though, so for now it’s pretty bare. I have found some sheers I like that would look good with the yellow walls that I may eventually buy. Again I want the curtains for the personality, but I am definitely not wanting to obscure the natural light coming into this room. I envision long rods on each side of the sunroom with the curtains mostly gathered in the corners.
The homeschool room is as put together as it’s going to get for a little while. We’ve reused all the previous furniture we had for homeschool storage and are using an existing Ikea fold out table we had in our old basement. It works for now although we have plans to change it all out to use the space better and house a TV and a homeschool desktop computer. A new addition to our homeschool room is a digital piano we picked up for a great deal for Creative Kid’s birthday. He’s been wanting one for a while and we want to add piano lessons to our curriculum, so we’ll probably be starting all that after the first of the year. I got this adorable curtain for the room that works well with our pale yellow walls.
In our great room we got all new furniture minus a couple of old end tables we already owned. We went with 2 couches and 2 chairs and at first I was afraid it was going to be too much for the space, but I think it’s working for us okay right now. One couch and one chair is cloth for a pop of color and the other pair are leather with recliners in them. We went with a quality Flexsteel option for the leather and a cheaper set for the cloth as I figure we will primarily being using the leather when we don’t have company.
I still haven’t decided what I want to do about the wall of windows in the great room. We don’t have any sort of problem with sun blinding anyone through those windows so it’s not a necessity and technically it opens up to our own land so there shouldn’t be a privacy issue, but curtains might be nice to warm up the room and bring together the look of the room.
And finally in our master bedroom, I picked out a curtain and a new bedspread. Here’s a bit of the curtain and a picture of the bedspread I bought because my bed is hardly ever made. ?♀️ I would love to have my bed made if not on a daily basis at least on a regular basis, but there’s a total of 7 pillows on our bed as well as 2 sheets and 2 sets of blankets…how do you make that work?!?♀️ If we share blankets, I will end up with none because he moves around in his sleep so we made the decision many years ago to just use 2 of everything and it works great for sleeping because he also runs hotter than I do so he rarely wants as much bedding as I do…but how do you really make a bed with all that? If someone has found the answer, please let me know.
I’ll be posting more about the house as we get some of these issues figured out and move on to make the house look more finished and more like a home. We’ve only put up a few things on the walls and that’s one area I want to focus on to help make the house more homey. I am planning to do a gallery wall up the staircase, but that’s going to take some planning and getting some new picture frames and some larger family photos.
I also plan to start back up with homeschool posts now that we’ve been back at it for several weeks and a variety of other subjects.
Getting back to normal…
Thanks for reading!
