Penelope’s Playroom

I’m not gonna lie – we had the BEST time planning Penelope’s playroom. It’s just so fun creating a space that’s meant to be fun and spark creativity and adventure for our little girl to enjoy. We took advantage of Pete being off for the summer to create the perfect space for Penelope. Right now, since we spend most of our time in our living room, we have a bunch of her favourite toys in there – her play mat, Jolly Jumper, activity centre, toys and some of her books. But after a while, we were ready to have our living room back to being a living room and NOT a toy warehouse.

I started by looking on Pinterest (where else??) for ideas, and compiled a few ideas from different posts to create P’s playroom. Our goal – comfy and cozy but also clean and bright, LOTS of storage, and incorporate a place for her to sit and read. The most important part: it needed to be able to grow with her. Most of the furniture was purchased from Ikea – we didn’t want to spend thousands on organizational furniture, but we’ve also always loved Ikea’s modern and clean pieces.

We decided to paint the room white – clean, crisp, and it really helped to brighten up the space. The room has 2 corner windows and we really wanted to showcase them. I love the white paint because it makes the view out of the windows even more beautiful! We’re still debating on if we want to have an accent wall, but we just can’t decide!

READING NOOK

For Penelope’s main storage area and reading nook, we purchased 2 of these shelving units from Ikea. We laid them out so that the one of them lays on the ground and the other one is stacked on top of the other one to frame the window & create a bench seat she can sit on as she gets older. It’s also good because it adds storage to the room to hold some of her toys and books – we bought a few white storage boxes to put in the cubes to hold toys and help keep the room look a bit more organized. The square, pink pillow is from Wayfair, the pink velvet pillow is from Urban Outfitters and we used a body pillow for the seat cushion (it’s a perfect fit)! Next to her reading nook is a chair we used to keep in our living room, but sometimes it’s nice to have a chair to sit in while she plays on the carpet, so we gave ourselves a little spot to hangout.

CRAFT AREA

We wanted to create an area for when she gets older so we can sit and do crafts, or just have another spot to hangout. After some searching, we landed on this table and these stools – and one of the coolest parts is that the table has storage you can add to it, so we bought two of these storage boxes! It’ll be a while before we can use these to their full advantage, but I’m happy we have them in the space.

The rug is from Overstock and we are so in love with it – it’s super comfy too, and a really low pile which we liked for this space. And it combines our love of everything neutral with some accent colours which is perfect for a playroom.

We’ve put all of her toys in this room now, and it’s just so nice to have an entire room dedicated to her toys. We bring some of them out during the day to sit in the living room so we can play as a family, but just knowing that at the end of the day they go back to their respective places makes me feel way less stressed.

What do you think? Do you think the room needs an accent wall in a fun colour or pattern, or are you loving the white? Let us know!

— Rachel & Peter