On a Dime Decorating & Organizational Ideas For Your Small Playroom

Yay! You dont’ know how excited I am that I finally get to share with you our playroom. I started back in October but was overwhelmed with the task and it was left unfinished until now. It’s also our homeschool space so I’ve been itching to get this project DONE.

I spent yesterday, morning, afternoon and evening finishing it and I absolutely love how it turned out. Let me tell you a little bit about our playroom. It’s small. One whole wall has built-in shelves and we use them but they take up a lot of space and I probably would have chosen a different way to set them up if had been left up to me.

It’s not just our playroom it’s our homeschool space AND craft storage area. In the past years, I’ve tried different things but they didn’t seem to work because we had too much stuff. So my first piece of advice would be declutter. We got rid of broken toys and other things that were not in good shape. We plan on giving away some of the toys they just don’t get used anymore but are in good shape.

We decorated and organized our playroom with things we already had so we didn’t build or make any major purchases (though I did have to run out and buy 3 more plastic bins).

Here’s what we did:

Wall Art –

I had the JOY of painting those giraffes for my boys. I have three boys and with this art, I wanted them to know that it’s okay to stand out, it’s okay to be different.

One of my hobbies is painting so I did happen to have an old canvas laying around that I painted over, so this fun art didn’t cost me anything.

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Wall Organizer (pictured above) – Repurposed cabinet doors!

Art display– It has a clipboard where they can place their favorite piece of school work. Just cover an old clipboard with wrapping paper and use packaging clear tape to keep it sturdy.

Chalk Notes – Here we can right messages to each other, reminders or they can just draw on it. I love quotes so I may just do that for my sons morning homeschool time.

Corkboard Notes – Also, another place where we can post up notes, school work! I had an old corkboard piece and I just attached it to the cabinet door with some fun bunting I made from triangle pieces of paper and ribbon.

Stuff Organizer

Repurposed Doors into Shelves – (pictured above) I really wanted to add long shelves in that room so I asked my husband to make some. After we priced everything it was more than we wanted to spend, so we got innovative. We used some old closet doors and my wonderful hubby turned them into shelves.

Decked out plastic bins – So basically here I added pretty paper and ribbon to the plastic bins to give them a makeover. You can’t see all the bins but the bins with red ribbon are my stuff and the blue ribbons are their toys.

Educational Wall

I repurposed these dollar store wall hangers that I used for our kids when they were babies to store medicines, creams and what not. If you’re observant you may have noticed that the pictures and the letters inside my wall hangings don’t match. A “frog” doesn’t start with the letter “R”. That’s because they are Spanish cards that we are going to use for my son’s homeschool foreign language time. We will change them up with different cards once we get tired of those. I love the idea of using this to hold our flashcards. Yay, I finally got to hang these wall hangers somewhere.

Repurposed Water Bottle

If you haven’t noticed yet we enjoy repurposing our stuff. Here I used a water bottle and added fabric and ribbon to the top to store my ribbon in it. The lovely thing it was no sew!!!! You can get the details and instructions here.

Interactive Wall Map

I bought this map about 8 months ago and I put it up on the wall but it came off and it ended up rolled up, in a corner for months. I’m so glad it’s finally up on the wall. My hope is to make this an interactive map. I’m going to trace the continents and other things that our kids can Velcro on to the map as they wish. My boys have enjoyed mapping out where we’ve visited, Ethan is showing me our last adventure. Aiden had a turn showing us our adventure trips and he was over in Africa somewhere. We’ve never been there but I have a feeling he’s going to learn a lot from this map. Though I must say they’ve definitely gone to more places I have at their age.

Inspirational Word Art Mini Mural

I wanted to personalize this a bit more for my boys and this is what I came up with. I’m not in love with the mini mural but I think I can live with it. While I was painting Aiden my little artist came in and wanted to join me and before I knew it all 3 of them were painting alongside of me. Since it was a word art (and needed it to be precise) I didn’t want them to help me but they were happy just painting next to me.

I especially loved that I could repurpose these Christmas pillows for their reading area.

I didn’t get pictures but we used clothes hampers for their toys since they have lots of big bulky toys that needed lots of open space to store. I think I can now say I’m officially done!