This is probably our most used room (and definitely one of my favorites) in the whole house! The girls and I are in here almost all day when we are home together.
The playroom was once part of our unfinished storage area. It literally wrapped around the entire house in the basement and it was just too big, actually. I thought it was such a waste of space since we didn’t have a ton of stuff that needed to be in storage anyway, so I decided to finish it off and designed a special room for my girls to enjoy!
The first thing I had to do was frame up the walls and hang the drywall! My two awesome aunts helped me put up some of the drywall on the ceiling because it’s nearly impossible to do alone (without some kind of jig anyway). They’re the greatest people, but that’s a story for a different day. After the frames were covered, I started the taping and mudding process. It’s very tedious, but also kind of therapeutic. It’s seriously an art form because you have to get everything as smooth as you can. Mudding and smoothing everything out was definitely the longest process to this whole remodel.
In my head, I had the idea of building an actual play house in the playroom for months! I had a few general ideas of what I wanted the design to look like, so I put it to paper and came up with a few sketches. After looking at hundreds of home exteriors on the handy dandy Pinterest, I found myself gravitating more towards white exteriors, craftsman style finishes, vertical board and batten, and cedar roofing”. So I combined all of those together into a super mini version…and designed the frame around that!
After the house was up, I laid the flooring. I used this Luxury Vinyl Plank Flooring from Home Depot, and I knocked out 270 square feet of flooring by myself in under 2 hours. It was seriously the easiest installation, ever! Now it was on to painting and adding the details (my favorite part of any project!). I love the board and batten strips for the exterior, the little baby light sconces, the grass patches on either side of the front door, the cedar shingles, the robins-egg-blue door, and the rainbow gallery wall as you come down the slide!
For Emma’s 2nd birthday, I built her this little farmhouse inspired kitchen set. Since then though, I have painted all of the hardware gold. The girls pretend to play “house” and “cook food” everyday, so I was really happy to see it fit perfectly inside the house!!! I added some horizontal shiplap inside, this subway tile peel and stick wallpaper, and made the cute ships ladder to get up to the slide deck!
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My whole inspiration for the playroom was based around dramatic play. “Dramatic playing” is a time when kids can break through the walls of reality… and they can pretend and dramatize situations and actions. I think it’s a great way to expand their imaginations! For the dramatic play stations, I included: a school with vintage school desks that I found and refinished, a bakery and cafe, a farmers market, a resturant area that also serves as the arts and crafts table, a kitchen inside their house, a dress up station with a vanity, and a library that is actually the door to the toy storage closet.
I have plans to do a huge wall mural of a city/neighborhood scape soon to make the room feel even more like little town… and to just bring in some color since there aren’t any windows.
The playroom is ever changing, but it has to be one of my very favorite projects I’ve done in our home! It is easily one of my favorite rooms simply for the laughter, creations, and imagination that goes on in there.
