Flexible Furniture

As our family grows older, our needs change. I try to buy very sturdy furniture that I can imagine multiple uses for and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This white bookcase from Ikea has been moved three times and as you can see, it is no small piece.

On the left, you can see how it was originally used to fill a great multipurpose need in my kitchen/livingroom/diningroom/daycare space.

A couple years later, my home daycare closed and we rearranged the house and moved hubby's office out of the basement. The basement became the kids' primary domain. We turned his former office into a play space.

I was desperate for toy storage.  I took apart the giant shelf and brought it down stairs to our play room and its primary purpose was toy storage.

Now we have moved to a completely new house. Some of my kids are still into small toys, so bins on the bottom work great for all those legos, cars, trains and dollies! My older child is into gaming consoles and so now it the bookshelf sports all the games, cords, gadgets and related gaming paraphernalia.

Faux Fireplace

These crazy double arches are what drew me to the new house initially. But I could never really bear the white of one and the wood of the other with that crazy faux fireplace in between.

I painted the wooden arch white to match the smaller arch. I took some old recycled gray paint added some water and softly painted that orange faux brick. I thought it turned out ok.

But I still wasn't happy with the fake wood. My youngest mentioned he wanted a fishtank for his birthday and I wanted it down low enough he could help take care of the fish without risk of tipping the tank over. The cats are delighted and love to lay in front of the tank and watch the fish!

Touch of Teal

The old house I've been working on for nearly a year is almost done. It is a small bungalow but the livingroom and kitchen are in this open concept style so there is a large continuous space I have been trying to figure out how to tie together to stage for sale. I just needed a pop of teal in the kitchen so I printed the little Mary Poppins quote from my computer and the rest is materials from a scrap book making kit.

To update the kitchen, we did many very simple little things. We added a sticker tile metal back splash from Home Depot. One cupboard door was in really bad shape, so I just took it off and hung wine glass holders in the top shelf.  There was a funny looking gap between the corner cupboard and the window, so I put in two corner shelves in to round out the space.

The range hood exhaust pipe was quite ugly above the cupboards. So I got some tin from Home Depot, bent it to shape, spray-painted it with white appliance enamel paint to match the appliances and it is just sitting up there looking like its attached to the range hood through the cupboard.  A little hard to see in the picture because I placed some silver metal tins up there for decoration.

Then I painted the kitchen cupboards grey and the pots are hanging from a bathroom shelf I found at Ikea. Very simple little changes, but it all came together well for a clean aesthetic and functional look.

Place of Peace

I always try to find a little place of peace in my life. With 3 kids, I struggled with finding a spot of my own- NO PLACE is sacred to little kids! This spot is an area where I demolished a rotten old shed. I made a chalkboard using chalk board paint from Home Depot.

By the way, that beehive under Buddha only seems to work on hornets/wasps. A regular hive of bumblebees took up immediate residence in the pavers.