Two Kids in One Bedroom – All Done!

My mother-in-law is coming to stay with us in a few weeks and since she’s staying for five months she needs her own room; thus the challenge of merging both kids’ things into one bedroom. Here are some before pictures of my daughter’s room (the room we moved both kids into):

Daughter’s bed

Shelves / dresser

Little brother’s room

As you can see the big room was already pretty crowded and cluttered, and brother’s room was just about the same. We knew we needed to stack the kids somehow instead of having two separate beds, so we decided to go with the Kura loft bed from Ikea.

Assembling the loft: it would have been easier if the instructions weren’t missing steps!

One big part of the process was sorting and thinning out the books and toys – I’m trying out a rotation system so that the toys and books stay interesting and fresh and the amount of choice isn’t overwhelming. I got three big bins (for group “A”, “B” and “C”) and put together three sets of toys and books (group “A” is the group in the bedroom). It took a few hours just to sort all the books and divide them into three sets, and then a ton of time to sort the toys. I tried to group them by themes as much as possible, so that all the farm animals are in the same set as the barn and tractors, and the books about farms.

Most of today was spent putting everything back into the room and moving some of the hooks and hanging things around in the room. Here’s the result:

Clothes and toy storage

Toys and art station

Loft bed

We’re so pleased with how it turned out, and our daughter is thrilled too. Little brother on the other hand is much less thrilled – he wants his old room back, and he thinks Tita (grandma) can just sleep with us. We’re hopeful the coolness of the loft bed will eventually win him over.