reorganizing and repainting

More shelves, more bins, more containers, more baskets.  It’s never enough.  I don’t know if it’s that the kids are in three different stages in terms of what they play with, that we need to have boy and girl toys, or just simply that we have too much stuff.  Whatever the reason, it seems that the playroom needs constant reorganizing.  The latest section that needed help was this one…

So what do you do when you need to reorganize?  Go to IKEA or course!  I love IKEA…their furniture, their decorating and organizing ideas, their prices.  And it’s a fun place…the kids love the children’s section.  We always have a good time when we go and I feel accomplished heading home with something new to add to a room.  This time around, we bought wall shelves to help reorganize the section above and here it is below, after the shelves…

Now for the repainting.  I’ve been itchin’ to paint for months.  The kitchen needs to be touched-up, Emily wants pink in her room, I’d like to do the kids’ bathroom and I’ve decided that I don’t really like our front living room.  Which painting project did I choose?  None of the above.  I decided to go with the family room because all of the sudden I just became tired of it.  We painted it New Year’s Eve 2002 and at the time, I loved it.  We did a midnight blue on the bottom and a taupe on the top with a stencil in between (as seen below in the only picture I could find with the family room wall in the background)… But it had been seven years and I really needed a change.  So after about a week of painting every night after the kids went to bed, and a little bit on a weekend day with their help…

 we have a new family room!  It’s simpler, brighter, cleaner, fresher.  The color is called ‘rice grain’ and is basically an off-white.  The room immediately looked bigger and brighter.  I love it.  The only thing I’m contemplating is putting up a chair rail and then maybe painting the lower part one shade darker on the same color strip.  Carl thinks I’m nuts.  I’m thinking summer project.  We’ll see.

These are new curtains too.  Unplanned…but the color I picked for the wall ended up being a match to the former curtains.  I found these at WalMart and the green is the same green in our couches so they’re a nice addition.