Turn a Dining Room into a Playroom

Our finished basement was our playroom, but there was a problem: my kids didn’t want to play in the basement!  A friend, who is converting her dining room into an art/craft/homework room, gave me an idea…why not turn our seldom-used dining room into a playroom?  Genius.  Pure genius. Here’s how to turn a dining room into a playroom and finally put a lonely room to good use!

Now, I have to say: I loved our dining room.  I put the whole thing together – paint, rug, table, chairs … the whole shebang.  And I loved it.  But, you know, we aren’t formal dining people.  We used our dining room maybe once or twice a year, and otherwise it was just used as a storage room.

Here are the “before” pictures:

We have a big living room.  It’s really two rooms, but, when we moved in, we knocked down the wall between them to make one big room.  But there’s definitely enough room for the dining table in there.  Before I decided to move everything around, we had a small table in here for the kids to do puzzles or play games on.  Here’s what the living room looked like:

After thinking and measuring and thinking some more, I decided to do it – put the dining room in the living room and put the playroom in the dining room.  The kids and Dear Husband were out of town, and I was brain dead from a weekend at our retreat for work, so this seemed like a good thing to do.

And here’s the result…

First, the playroom:

I changed the curtains – the dining room had rust-colored silk tone-on-tone curtains.  The playroom now has curtains I had bought (a while ago) in the as-is room at Ikea for $10 each.  I’m going to tie them back with some green ribbon.

This is the view from the living room.  I moved the rug from the guest room/my office in there, as well as the Ikea Expedit toy storage from the living room, M’s doll house (formerly my doll house), the art table and art supplies from the basement, plus most of the toys.  Oh, and two beanbags and a lamp for a reading nook (I love nooks).

The art table is on the left, with two chairs (one for each kid), plus Ikea white ceramic planters holding pencils, colored pencils, scissors and markers.

The reading nook in the corner.

And here’s what the living room looks like now…

View from the kitchen

View from adjacent corner (dining room entrance).

View from front hall.