Bunk Bed
It is not at all unusual to experience a noticeable dip in your mood right after the buzz of the bright holiday season. Either you’ve spent too much money or eaten too much food. You’ve probably been running around foolishly attempting to squeeze way too much activity into already busy lives. After all the decorations are put back into their appropriate storage place, and the house cleaned up the place can seem empty and dull.
This is the perfect time to create a new project for yourself that will perk up your mood and hopefully result in some very real improvement for your household. Particularly growing families can benefit from a seasonal goal to organize the kids’ rooms. Simple, yet clever choices throughout your home can help save time, money and address a growing family’s needs. By the time you are finished, it will be much closer to spring time and the winter blahs will be a memory.
How to start? First you have to force everyone, including yourself, to go through the drawers and closets and toss out whatever is not being fully used. This includes outgrown clothes, shoes, toys, and old school work. The only way to make small space function better is to be brutally honest about eliminating the clutter of unnecessary things. If you can afford to call in a closet organizer company to maximize closet storage it is a worthwhile investment in organization.
Try to think of your young children’s room like a college dorm, or more politically correct, a college residence hall where there is a finite amount of floor space with no hope of expansion. According to Davis Remignanti, the lead design consultant at Furniture.com, bunk beds are the rage. “In kids’ rooms, bunk beds and lofts are obvious choices for maximizing floor space and today’s styles are often packed with built-in storage for clothes and toys.” Our example demonstrates how efficient the concept can be with two beds, a small study desk, and clothes storage all packaged into a compact foot print! Sometimes college bunks lift a single bed up off the ground and offer storage under each bed as well as a study area.
Remignanti also offers, “Planning ahead and making the right choices about home furnishings now can go a long way towards ensuring a comfortable, kid-friendly home as your family grows throughout the years.” One idea he offers is to reuse and re-cycle little kid’s furniture. For instance, baby and toddler dressers tend to be narrow, with easy to open drawers and pulls that are close together to fit the proportions of tiny hands and short arm spans. When you find that your little ones have outgrown such a dresser, it can easily be tucked into a closet for extra storage.
Another suggestion is to investigate the myriad of storage cubes available that range from colorful hard plastic to simple white plastic or plastic coated wire ones. What is great about these is that they are not expensive, stack, and can be easily moved around the house. They can hold all sorts of stuff from games to dolls to sports equipment. Of course, you must train your kids to actually put their good stuff in the storage boxes, but that is the easier part of this plan! Another good way to make the kids’ rooms more functional is to invest in a set or two of nesting tables that can be taken to the task. When the homework project or game is done, then the tables can stack back up in the living room in order to save space while they “nest”.
In most small homes the kitchen table becomes the place where homework gets done, bills get paid, and the laptop comes out in the evening. Davis Remignanti also suggests that you locate some sort of small-scale hutch or maybe a wall unit that can serve as a work station. This one piece of furniture will allow you to quickly and without much hassle stash away messy items like the stapler, pens, bills, and stamps in a way that is both convenient and attractive. Maybe the computer can live in there too.
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Copyright © Copley News Service. Used with permission.
