Family Room

After swallowing a hard dose of cold reality, I realized that the chances of painting the family room before this little guy is born were extremely slim.  So, I went ahead and rearranged all the furniture and got the room set up the way I wanted.  It is still kind of rough, there's no decorating done or anything like that but the set up seems to be very workable for us.  We have done school quite a few times and found it to be ideal.  Also, with the kids toys where they are at, the little ones can play quietly with toys right next to us while we do school!

In this picture you can see how it's set up.  The computer desk works so well under the window!  Next to it is the turtle tank in the corner, then the school shelves, then a dresser full of all our games (we like to play games, so we have a lot of them), and finally the toy shelves.  We bought a new tank for Elijah's frogs and put them on top of the game dresser.

Here are the school shelves.  I went through the school stuff somewhat as I put it on but I need to do more sorting and organizing as I can.  All our picture albums, baby books, etc are on the top shelves.  I also put all the art supplies (paper, glue, scissors, playdough, etc.) on these shelves.  Our library books occupy one shelf (2nd shelf from bottom, left side) and our kid books are on the next shelf down.  I'm always amazed at how much school/kid/art stuff there is!

And here are the toy shelves.  I did a major sorting of all the toys when I set up this shelf.  No, these are not all the toys, we still have 7-8 bins of toys in the garage as well as oversized toys that I switch out on a daily basis.  The toys that made it onto these shelves are the ones that are played with consistently on a daily basis.  There's also a box of weapons next to the shelves on the left that you can't see in this picture.

I would still like to work in a bookshelf just for books, but I'm not sure where yet.  Maybe in the corner by the game dresser?  I also want to build some shelves to hang above the toy shelves to put 3D art that the kids make on, and hang up a bulletin board to display all the drawings the kids make.  But for now, I'm very happy with how this worked out!