Our house is about 90% set up at this point and I’m feeling pretty good. It’s a strange house we have -Â quirky and small, and while I disliked it at first, it’s starting to grow on me now. Two of the things our house is lacking are a guest bedroom and a playroom space. In order to remedy this we had to get a bit creative.
For the guest room, we’ll be kicking Nia out of her queen bed when we have guests and putting her on a mattress on the floor.
And as for the playroom, we decided the best option would be to put it out in the garage. You may remember from early photos I shared of the yard that it’s an open 1-car garage. We have a portico for the cars to go under, so it wasn’t needed as a garage.
When we noticed the girls initially congregating in there to play because it was cooler, we thought, “Hmm. This could be the solution to our playroom problem.”
So we basically took everything that used to be in Nia’s room, put it out in the garage, added some foam tiles and painted it to give it more of a playroom feel.
What I’ve ended up loving about this solution is that I’m not tripping over toys in the house all the time (or squealing girls for that matter). It’s all so nicely contained in the garage. And this way, Michelle and Evelyn can feel free to play there anytime, even if we aren’t home.
The downsides of this situation are dirt, rain and critters. The dirt/dust blows in constantly and gets everything dirty. We’ve remedied this by putting as much as we can in bins. The remaining items just get washed or wiped down once a week.
We learned a good lesson last weekend when the thunderstorm soaked the foam tiles and left them smelling moldy. They required a serious scrub-down. We’ve since removed the tiles that were over by the window and are hopeful that the rain won’t be able to reach the remaining section.
And as for creepy, crawly critters. Nothing major so far, but I’m just dreading the day we come across a giant spider or snake in there. Ugh – I shudder just thinking about it…
You might be wondering how we ended up with a purple garage. I initially wasn’t going to paint it, but I came up with this wacky idea of painting our living room in a 3-toned purple gradient (pics to come of that). We had to buy 3 different cans of paint (only size available was 5 Liters), so I ended up with a ton of extra paint. Hence the purple garage!
I’m actually quite delighted with how it turned out. It barely looks like a garage anymore! And best of all, the girls are so at home there, plus Nia is getting 5+ hours of outside time each day. Definitely good for her little being!
