What I did today
I took a day off of work (for the most part) and finished painting Noah’s playroom. Brett did the first coat last night and I helped him by screwing up the edging and making his work more difficult. Bother. Who knew painting was so hard? Anyway, today I put on the second coat then rearranged the furniture.
This is how the playroom is set up (and know that I’m writing this for myself ‘cuz I can’t see anyone else caring that much so feel free to skip it!):
It’s down in our finished basement. Half the basement is unfinished and the other half houses Brett’s secret room and Noah’s playroom. The playroom is probably about — well, let’s see. Our house is 945 square feet. It’s a full basement and I’d say that the playroom takes up about 1/3 of it, which makes for a nice 315 square feet of pure play space. The walls are light wood halfway up and then the other half is plastered. It was painted a pleasant gray but is now a sunny yellow. The carpet is white and — frankly — hideous. We want to get a darker carpet in there at some point. A pleasant berber with speckles to hide the grime.
Noah has a lot of big toys. He’s got a train table and a wooden slide (like the kind you see in preschools), a dollhouse (the wooden kind with a red roof — you’ve probably seen it around, I think Plan Toys made it) and a wooden kitchen set with a ‘fridge gleaned from a thrift store. The kitchen set and ‘fridge are in the “real basement” (the unfinished part) because Noah never plays with it. When the next baby is a toddler, we’ll pull it back out and find a place for it. Anyway, it’s a lot of big stuff so it’s nice to have a big place. We also have a corner sofa sectional that’s a similar gray to what the walls were down there. It’s huge and ugly but the cushions come off and Noah loves it. He can build forts and bounce around and since it’s already trashed, we don’t care if children trash it further. We’re all about the play value.
The television is down there, too, so we’ve got the tv set up across from the corner couch, the train table against the wall under the windows and the slide in the middle so that there’s room for daredevil trickery. The dollhouse is next to the tv and the dress-up box is next to that.
The playroom has a huge, walk-in closet with shelves on every wall and that’s where his other toys are. He’s got bins for his building toys (legos, lincoln logs, tinker toys, duplos and wooden blocks), his people/animals, his cars, etc. You know typing this, I realize that we ought to think about paring down the building toys because he also has a small set of Zoobs and K’nex from his last birthday. But, man, building toys are so great and he uses them all for different reasons. Except for those nice wooden blocks, actually. He barely touches them anymore.
The playroom is the reason we fell in love with the house.
OK, so my big triumph was that I finally got the bookshelves organized. The playroom has one 6-foot bookshelf (bought it yesterday), three 4-foot shelves, and one wee little shelf that Brett made. They’re full of the chapter books I’ve been collecting. Most of his picture books are upstairs but there are some down there, too. The chapter books are obstensibly because we’re homeschooling but the truth is that I’m a big fan of kid lit and when it comes down to it, I’m greedy about books. I had them all in alphabetical order by author but it made it too hard to find stuff ‘cuz I can’t always remember who wrote what so I made a new system that may make sense only to me. I think — no, I know — that we have more kid books than grown-up books. Hmmm. I just realized that.
I’ve got the historical fiction and biographies (The Courage of Sarah Noble, the stories about ordinary kids (the Moffat Books), and the stories of ordinary kids facing life challenges (Walk Two Moons) in two of the smaller bookshelves. I also have some of the ordinary kids in semi-fantasy environments that address real issues like some of Louis Sachar’s books and Maniac Magee there. In the homemade bookshelf, I have realistic animal adventure stories (The Incredible Journey) and fantasy animal stories (The Rats of NIMH and Rabbit Hill), also all of the various boy and his dog stories (like Shiloh and Where the Red Fern Grows). The third small bookshelf is Arthurian legends and other science fiction/fantasy books and I put the E. Nesbit and Edward Eager-type books there. In the largest bookshelf I’ve got the books that are much too old for Noah (the likes of Robert Cormier and Paul Zindel) up on the top shelf. Then there’s Noah’s tape and CD player. On the next shelf are some of the story collections although most of those are up in Noah’s room (along with all the Beverly Cleary books) and the books that most catch Noah’s fancy right now (the Bunnicula series and some nicely illustrated chapter books). At the very bottom are the picture books.
It makes me crazy happy to have so many books; it’s definitely an area where I am unabashedly materialistic. I’ve been sitting on the couch down there grinning and rubbing my hands together as I note the empty shelf spaces yet to be filled. I love to talk about kids’ books, too. Sometimes I wish I could make enough money to warrant working in a bookstore because it thrills me to chat people up about books and it makes me positively gleeful to recommend books to people and have them listen to me. It’s like matchmaking, really, because the right book can change a person’s life.
Finding decent wooden bookshelves is challenging, as many of you well know. All of the shelves downstairs are from Lowe’s and I think they’re designed to be storage shelves. They aren’t adjustable but the biggest shelving unit is tall enough to hold big picture books and the smaller ones can hold them on the bottom shelf, so that’s good. Also, they’re solid, unfinished wood, which is nice for any decor or could be painted and stained. The best thing about them is that they are sturdy as hell. You know how lots of bookshelves bend if you put books in them? These don’t ‘cuz they’re solid wood. They don’t have backs, which makes them nice for stereo equipment or other electronics. I highly recommend them. Also, they’re cheap. The smaller ones were about $15 or so and the bigger one was around $30-something. That’s a nice price for shelves that won’t fall apart no matter how much you load ‘em up.
