In making room for baby, we are reorganizing our upstairs bedrooms. We currently have a guest room, and room full of a bunch of crap we never use. One of these rooms is going to become the baby room. The second room needs to be refashioned to function like the previous two rooms. As part of the reorganization, I've spent that last few weeks brainstorming what I really NEED the second room to accomplish. Here is what I have so far.
1. Guest Room. We need a place for family to stay who are visiting from out of town. This, to me, means we need a bed, or something that converts to a bed.
2. Storage. We have a lot of books, dvds, etc. that are currently thrown all over that room. We need a way to store these (much better I might add) that creates storage and function in the room.
3. Laundry. I currently use our guest room closet to air dry my clothes and the room itself to iron in.
So here is what I have come up with. Having an actually bed in the room is going to take up WAY too much space for all the other purposes I need. To fix this, I am looking at sofa beds. I've been doing some searching and I found one I really like from IKEA. It will primarily be a couch for us to use when we are reading in the room, but can also convert to a bed when people visit.
I also want to create a bookcase storage system with lots of bins that I can use to store all the random things we have in there. A lot of books, dvds, craft supplies, decorations, etc. I am leaning towards these IKEA ones because I have them throughout the rest of the house and I feel like as we move to and from houses in the future we can merge them together based on the needs of the rooms. They work really well elsewhere and I think they would do the trick. To match the rest of our house, these would be the dark espresso brown color.
For laundry purposes, I think I can continue to use the closet. There is plenty of room to hang clothes to dry, and I can fold my ironing board up and place it and the steamer in there if I can shift some of the other items out of the closet and into the bookcase. This seems like the best approach, because I don't really want the ironing board out in the middle of the room.
This will leave me with a little extra space in there and I am trying to figure out what to do with it. Right now I am leaning towards putting a chair and side table in there for further seating... but I could also make it more of a play room. Maybe put a tiny table, a tee pee, etc. for when the baby gets older. I just can decide.
What do you use your spare room for? Am I missing anything that I should be taking into account??
