Spring or Christmas cleaning?

Now considering it is November, it is still considered Spring in Australia, but I really think the sorting or cleaning I did yesterday could more be called Christmas cleaning.

I started sorting through the kids toys, trying to decide what could be put in the shed and what to give to the Salvos. With Christmas being six and a half weeks away and my daughters 6th birthday being six weeks off, I have started to think about all the new toys that will suddenly descend on the house. This is not helped my my kids being the only two grandchildren on either side.

So yesterday I found myself busy sorting and thinking hard about storage, do I need another visit to IKEA? I think I might!

So what do you think, belated Spring cleaning or honest Christmas sorting and do you do this?

Kids bedroom elements

With our extension we added to our two bedroom house with two more bedrooms, thinking how excited the kids would be to get their own bedrooms. Well my five year old daughter and three year old son have decided they want to both stay in their old bedroom and keep sharing, so the new rooms have become a playroom / guest room and a study (where I am now writing this blog post).

So I thought I would share with you some elements of the playroom, a bit of a sneak peak as I haven't implemented all my ideas to make this room a little magical for the kids, a plan for the next two months.

As you will see I am going for a red, blue and white colour theme. Love these ball cushions from Target......

This red checkered lamp from a kids bedroom store and of course some of my daughters art work from when she was three....


Can't go past IKEA for children's bedroom furniture, both the bed and chest of drawers are from there......

And these red carpet spots, the kids love moving them around........

Some red feet and hand artwork, done for Father's Day last year....

And the kids enjoying the room, love the soft grey carpet. The carpet is a new environmentally friendly one made from corn.....

The room also has built-ins which I will show at a later date once I have decorated a little more.

Hope you all had a great weekend, it was a little miserable here in Melbourne but good for staying inside and doing house things.

A bit of IKEA

I recently went to visit the new IKEA in Melbourne. Slightly larger then the Richmond one it was great to walk through, but due to it's popularity many of the items I was actually after had sold out.
Even so I managed to grab this $5 rug with the plan to put it just inside our new stacking doors but instead decided it made a great table runner, for a dining table that has seen better days. Lets just say with two young kids that much desired provincial dining table I would like to purchase is a little while away. So dressing the current one is the next best thing.

Hope you are having a wonderful weekend.

Blackboard easel for decoration and Happy Birthday

This blackboard / white board easel from IKEA has become a bit of a feature in our new living space.

As can be seen in my previous post we have a long white wall joining the kitchen and new family area. The easel now sits proudly in the middle of it and I am finding it works really well to add that personal family touch.

We have written menus for dinner, had kids drawings and written special messages on it.

Like today it is my gorgeous Mum's birthday and my five year old decorated the easel accordingly. Mum is over from Adelaide helping out with the school holidays, which I am so grateful for. My Mum gives me so much help and support. Happy birthday Mum!

Hoping to get more pictures on this wall .......

It is also nice with this visit to have the inside of the house almost finished and a bedroom for my Mum to sleep in away from all the noise. She used to sleep in the lounge on the fold out sofa bed.

Anyway will show pictures of new bedrooms soon just want to get a bit more decorating done.

Kids bedrooms

Now the build is well underway I have got even more focused on interior design ideas. Interestingly enough the rooms I am looking forward to doing the most are the kids bedrooms, I think because here you can potentially have the most fun.

Images from - http://www.livingetc.com

I do like these neutral styles above but with my kids love for colour they don't really suit.

I also love this beautifully classic style bedroom below but it would be more appropriate in a house a lot older then ours, plus my little girls favourite colour is red.

Image from - www.besthouseinterior.com/classic-childrens-bedrooms

Image from - childrensbedrooms.blogspot.com

This room would suit my five year old daughter more but with red instead of pink. I would also think of painting the wall behind the bed red. I do love bunting as a form of decoration.

Image from - homes-designing.net

And some good IKEA style and colour for my little boy. I think he would prefer a Lightening McQueen or Buzz Lightyear theme though if he had his way.

Thinking about the kids rooms I visited Adairs Kids the other day and was very tempted by the bed linen form the Morgan collection pictured below. Funnily enough they say it is for boys but my daughter would love the red. So maybe red for her and blue for my son.

Images from - www.adairs.com.au

We already have these star lights in the bedroom the kids share and I know my daughter will be taking them with her to her new room, so I am thinking of getting car shape ones for my little boys third birthday.

I can't wait to decorate these rooms but a few months away still, so I will keep collecting ideas.

Love for bookcases - storage with style

I am now in packing mode getting ready for the builders to start in a few weeks and our bookcases are one of the first things I have started to pack as we have quite a few.

Packing up our books and seeing the emptiness left behind has made me realise that bookcases really are a feature in our house - they provide a wall of colour against our white walls adding character and warmth to the room.

I love how they reflect our families personality and style, housing our books, pictures, ornaments we have collected on our travels and different things my daughter has made.

They also provide what I call ‘storage with style’. Ours are filled with coloured boxes containing CDs and cane baskets filled with toys (you can buy all those pictured from IKEA). Not only do the baskets look great but my kids love them. Maybe I am just lucky but both my kids enjoy sorting through the baskets (they are just the right size for them) and then putting the toys back in them at the end.

The issue with bookcases though is if they get too untidy they don’t look that great. In my case I haven’t seen keeping them tidy as a chore (packing them up is though). The way I look at it is by swapping over ornaments, changing photos and other things you can give the room a little easy design re-fresh. Also if you are an avid reader like me it is great to pull books out and reorder just to remind yourself what you have.

The bookcase itself can also add a ‘style’ to a room. In our family room I love the warmth that our large bookcase made of recycled timber provides. Whereas the simple white bookcases in our lounge frame our white art deco fireplace really well. Our smaller bookcase in the hall acts as great storage for shoes and for displaying things on top to act as a nice welcome into the house.

My dream with the extension is to have a wall of bookcases in the new family area. I can’t wait to do this and restock our existing bookcases once the dust settles.

The toy invasion - how do you deal with it in the home

Toys and stuff that goes with children are everywhere in my house. As my husband says the soft toys are like gremlins, they just seem to multiply over night. We need more storage and joke that we are doing our house extension just so we can fit everything.

The problem with me is I am one of these people that hates clutter, I like things to be tidy and am passionate (or as some might say obsessed) about interior design and rooms being 'just so'. I have to admit I actually get a little stressed if things are a mess and look disorganised. Now I am not a minimalist, I love a house to have warmth and character and express the family’s personality, just in an organised way, so wanted storage options that also add to the style of the room. The other thing I am concerned about is the environment and so always feel a bit funny about the amount of plastic toys the kids get given.

After my first I managed to keep things tidy organised and clean, with just one we could store most of the toys in her bedroom which we can't do now with the two in the one bedroom (we have a two bedroom house).

So being the neat freak I am have had to work out ways to deal with the toy explosion, both design / storage ideas and with my environmental hat on looking at the reduce, reuse, recycle concept.

Reduce - could say well stop buying so many as lets face it most kids play with it for about two minutes then loose interest, problem is we are not the ones buying them. My kids are the only Grandchildren on both sides of the family and their grandparents love to give them things especially as they live interstate from us so don't see them that often. We are trying to put limits on gifts and get them to buy books or things to make rather then more plastic. The great thing about books too is they have no extra packaging to get rid of.

Reuse - we have joined a toy library, so every three weeks they have different toys to keep them amused. We also often select games or puzzles which take up less space. Have also started the de-clutter of passing toys on that they have grown out of to either friends or charities.

Recycle - not an option for most toys unless you look at it in terms of giving to others as above.

Storage with a design element - as for the rest; storage, storage, storage - that fits in with the style of my rooms and is not an eyesore.

One of the best things I have discovered is small cane baskets from IKEA, they fit well into a standard bookshelf (and one thing I love is having bookshelves around the house, they can add a lot to a room if kept ordered, almost like a feature wall of beautiful things and colour) and in them I can store small things like cars, Little People, train set stuff, tea set. I have also bought larger boxes with beautiful designs (IKEA) and cane baskets that also act as side tables (from Queen Victoria Markets).