Playrooms and Princesses – I wish I was a kid again!

I wish I had a need for a playroom but perhaps I’ll be consulted in the near future for designing a playroom for nieces and nephews.

First, I love this playroom from Amy at Playfully Sublime. The detailed painting is so fun and check out the cool two story built in playhouse! You better believe I’d play in there, grown up or not! Here is her post:

The room at the end of the hall…

C. S. Lewis wrote to his Godchild after writing her the story “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and said, “My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books”. I have had the same realization now that we have completed our playroom. Little girls grow quickly, and before you know it, they are ducking their heads as they walk through the door of our playhouse.

There is so much to love about this room. For starters, I love that my husband was willing to tear off the roof of half of our house in order to “go up” with a playroom addition. I love that I told this cute carpenter of mine that I would really like some kind of built in house in the playroom, and he said, “okay, let’s make it two stories high”. I love that when it was all done, I needed power to the upstairs of the playhouse to hang white lights, and so he spent a late night pulling power for me.

I love that I ignored the sensible part of my brain that was telling me not to paint anything on those walls, because one day I would have to paint over it…which of course I will, but who cares. I am not an artist, I wing everything I do, but my girls do not know the difference in art that “real artists” create, and the sketches that their mom creates, so who cares. It’s child-like and fun and my kids are only children in a playroom for a very short amount of time.

I love that they love to play in it. I hear a lot of people say that their children will not play in playrooms…I have not had that experience. My kids play hard in this room.
I love that they would rather wear dress-up clothes than real clothes, especially Caroline, but even Ella!

I love that we have a “wall of fame”, as my blogger friend Edie calls them.

An aerial view…


You know you want to paint these shoes in your daughter’s room, I’m tempted to paint them in my room…
Playing hard…

Sleeping hard after playing hard…
And finally, just keeping it real…And this one from Amanda at Mom of Two Boys is awesome too! I love the chalkboard and art display and the organization! Here is her post:
It started with these…
Word stickers from Nama that say PLAY, GIGGLE and SO MANY TOYS SO LITTLE TIME…
So then I bought these…
Curtains from Wal-Mart…
Four panels, two for each side…
And I had this wonderful idea for my incredibly handy husband to paint…
A chalkboard…
A magnetic chalkboard…
I LOVE this…
I think he did a wonderful job…
I copied an idea I found online…
To display Aidan Kales’ artwork…
String and clothes pins…
I shopped our house and found things to hang on the walls…
And found ways to organize all the toys…
And the boys love playing in here…
Of course the truth is…
It isn’t always this clean…

And one more thing that I think fits in perfectly. This is the best tea party princess table I have EVER seen from Melissa at Puddin Pop Designs (how cute is that and her story?). Here is her post:


About a year ago Puddin was wanting a “tea party table” for when she was a pwincess.
We have a nice wood table for the kiddos but it is generic (not too girly or boy-ish… since we have both).
So, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money so I started looking around the house. I found one of those cheap inexpensive, screw together tables that you can find at WalMart but, it was a little tall for a 3 year old tea party.


Stained, dirty table from the garage

After I used my handsaw on the legs, it was the perfect height.

but still stained and dirty


Then I decided to paint it… colorful. Puddin liked it but it didn’t say “pwincess” to me.

So I went to my sewing room and started digging through my scraps. Puddin’s nursery had custom bedding, thanks to Nanny, and I had lots of fabric left over. Thankfully, I had enough to make a custom skirt for her table.

I added ribbons to tie to the legs just to make sure the little Monkey brothers
couldn’t pull it off when they stormed her room. So far, so good!

The table complete with skirt to match her bedding.

Now, all that was missing were seats. About the time I was making all of this I was also taking care of 2 newborns and 2 toddlers and a 3 year old and was seriously sleep deprived. So in the middle of the night I would think up home improvement projects I could do around here.
I have no idea why I was thinking of more things I could do?!?
Sleep deprivation makes you do crazy things.

That being said, I knew I wanted the seating to provide storage for the tea party set/food/etc., and I wanted it to be pretty, and to match, and to be cheap inexpensive.

Voila!

5 gallon Buckets!


I found these at WalMart or $5 bucks each. I got out my glue gun and staple gun and left over foam batting. I cut out enough foam to fit the lid, cut the fabric out to cover the foam and started attaching the fabric with the staple gun. I just stapled straight through the rim of the lid. Then I went around with a butter knife (I’m serious, ya’ll) and bent the staples down so there was no way little Puddin was going to get hurt.


Storage solution!! Yay!!


The stool was looking cute but it still needed something.
A skirt! Back to my fabric stash and a wee bit later I had whipped up 2 skirts to go around the stools. I added some ribbon for finishing touches and finally- it was complete!

A tea party table fit for a pwincess!


AND, another great thing about this is the skirts for the table and the stool are removable and can be washed, like when a little brother colors on the table with a crayon. Like now.

Thanks for sharing your super cute ideas ladies! I bet each one is so much fun!

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