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We’ve been spending a lot of time in our home over the past several months. My husband works from home and our kiddos are playing more at home. While we miss our lifestyle and daily activities pre-COVID, we have enjoyed transforming some of the spaces in our home to make them better fit the needs of our family.
As my children grown and enter new phases, I feel like I am needing to change the spaces in our home to match these new phases. I don’t mean completely redoing every space, but rather improving upon how we use the space and store the things with which we are blessed to own.
One of the rooms in the front of our house was our dining room. It was a pretty space with a table always decorated with a seasonal centerpiece. There was a hutch filled with my grandmother’s dishes and other small mementos. We ate in this space maybe 2-3 times per year. Other than that, we never spent time in this room.
Many many months ago, I causally suggested to my husband that we move the dining room table and hutch into our eat-in kitchen space. We wanted a bigger table for daily eating and we talked about getting a buffet/hutch piece for an empty wall. My thoughts were that we could move the furniture we already had instead of buying something else. This was something my husband had to think about so we didn’t pursue it just yet. I mean, it was going to be a big change for our house! The dining room furniture has been in the dining room for at least 10 years!
Fast forward several months, to the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine, and my husband brought up the idea of moving the hutch and table from the dining room into the eat-in kitchen space. We decided to try it out one afternoon to see how it looked and, while it was strange to see it in this space, we really liked it. Now we could enjoy seeing the dishes displayed in the hutch and use the bottom for additional storage space for kitchen items we don’t use often. Plus, the table gave us more space during meals.
Both of us grew up with one eating space in our homes so it didn’t seem strange to take away the dining room. However, moving the furniture pieces out of the dining room left us with an empty room. We needed to come up with a way to utilize the space to fit our family.
There were lots of ideas tossed around…..a second playroom, a sitting room, and a library. Well, we have a nice playroom space in the basement so it didn’t make sense to fill another room with toys. The sitting room sounds nice, but we didn’t see it being used very often. Most of our time is spent in the living room or playing/relaxing in the basement. The library was a good idea, too, but our books were stored nicely in our home office. We didn’t see a need to move them.
That’s when an activity room came to mind.
I have a lot of arts & craft supplies from my scrapbooking and teaching days. Plus, since becoming a mom, I’ve added to my collection quite a bit as I love to do arts and crafts with my kiddos. We had a tall cabinet that contained some of these supplies. Other supplies were in closets and storage ottomans in our home office space. We set up a folding table in the basement near the tall cabinet to be a project/craft space for me, but the location wasn’t the best if I wanted to do projects with the kids. Also, there wasn’t much natural light and I love my natural light!
We didn’t really have a dedicated craft space for the kids and tried a lot of different things over the past 3 years. I honestly wanted all of my supplies in one space and an area to do projects with the kids. I love doing arts & crafts with my toddler and preschooler so having a dedicated space where we can find all of the materials we need and spend time completing a project is important to me.
The newly emptied dining room was the perfect space for this!! A nice plus of this room is the bright sunshine that comes through the windows during the day. It makes me so happy!!
So our first COVID-19 quarantine home project of setting up and organizing the activity room came to life 😁
We moved the arts & crafts cabinet from our basement, fitting it perfectly between the windows.
We purchased a storage ottoman for under the window. It serves two purposes….storage and seating! It looks nice, too. Plus, my toddler enjoys lining up and playing with his toy cars and animals on it.
We moved a table that was in the basement into this space. This was our game table, but we have plans to eventually get a bigger table for playing games so it made sense to move this one into our new activity room. This table is perfect for painting and projects with glue. It is durable and easy to clean!
A cube shelf was moved into this space from another room. We did a little bit of reorganizing in our bedroom and living room to be able to free this cube shelf for the activity room. It’s actually kind of fun to “shop” around our house and try to repurpose (or find a better use for) the furniture we already have 😉
To be honest, this shelf was housing lots of books in the living room. We decided to use it to house all of our growing collection of children’s books. Thanks to Usborne Books & More, we’ve added many nonfiction, learning and fiction books to our home library. The kids LOVE reading them and we hadn’t quite found the perfect space for ALL of them. The cube shelf is perfect! I do keep the seasonal books stored away in our basement closet, though! These books come out and get put into a basket in the living room.
As I was getting this room organized, I started bringing our learning toys into the space, as well as our sensory play materials. The sensory play materials are stored inside the storage ottoman under the window.
It was a lot of work figuring out how best to organize and store everything so it made sense and was easily accessible. But, I was happy with how it turned out! We enjoyed a lot of painting projects, drawing, coloring, reading books, sensory play and Play Doh in this space over the summer.
As summer was coming to a close, our family needed to make a decision about preschool for our daughter. We decided withdrawing her from preschool and teaching her at home was the best option for our family. As I prepared and planned for this at-home preschool learning experience, my husband and I transformed the activity room even further into a learning space.
The painting was moved to another space in our home and replaced with a magnetic white board. We did some reorganizing in our basement playroom and brought up two plastic drawer units to organize our learning toys/activities. I hung up our awesome Melissa & Doug calendar and a pocket chart from my teaching days. The pocket chart will be great for sorting activities and other hands-on learning activities I plan to do with my preschooler.
The 5-drawer plastic storage unit is the perfect way to organize our books, toys and puzzles geared specifically to learning colors, numbers, shapes and letters. The teacher in me had to label the drawers, making it easy for my daughter (and myself) to find specific books or puzzles. Not only are labels a precursor to reading, they keep things organized and guide my daughter to be more independent. The clipart pictures provide a visual cue to each word.
I created photo collages for our kiddos and chose to display them in this room. They are are the reason why we created the space we did and I love seeing their smiling faces whenever we spend time in this room ❤
This 2-drawer plastic storage unit is perfect for storing my currently used teaching materials and our color sorting activities. When I say teaching materials, I am referring to the curriculum we are following (Playing Preschool from Busy Toddler), a spiral notebook for me to write down notes, as well as activities I print & prepare for the current theme, and specific books we will be reading. I’m trying to keep myself as organized as I can as we embark on this at-home preschool learning experience. The drawers also prevent me from piling on another flat surface!
It made sense to my husband and I to have a dedicated space for learning. While we learn a lot through play, I wanted to separate our play space from our learning space. Our days are spent in the living room, basement playroom, outside and the learning/activity room. My kids enjoy the change in scenery from each space during the day, especially when we spend most of our time at home.
So that is the how and why we transformed our dining room to an activity room in our home. We love the changes and enjoy spending time doing arts & crafts and preschool learning activities in the activity room. I love that all of the supplies and materials I need are in one place, making it super easy to create and learn with my preschooler 😍