Part 4: A dress up corner with little space and budget. It's possible!

Following the superhero capes that I made, I realized that we fell short of having a dress-up corner for the boys. Yep, you read me right. My boys do play dress up too, just like every other vain little girl, and I encourage that a lot. So much that I decided to find a corner in their room and turn it into a dress-up corner.

I have managed to scour quite a fair bit of costumes at really cheap prices over a period of two years, so the boys get to have fun with pretend play (at my expense sometimes) where I'll become their patient, patron, victim, and sometimes child. Roles turned around, it's actually quite fun when I am their child, because I get to see the mother I am in their eyes!

So anyway, I have always been a budget mom when it comes to their homeschooling expenses. Come on, things are not cheap in Singapore especially when it comes to little children! My husband and I used to joke how the younger and smaller the children are, the MORE expensive things are. Like diapers, milk powder, clothes, books, toys, okay you get the drift. This time around, I gave myself a budget of under ten dollars to create a corner entirely from scratch. I think finding that corner of space in my teeny home was harder than actually sticking to the budget!

Ikea Trofast Storage Container - $3-$7 (Depending on depth)

Daiso Extendable Rod - $2

A cowboy (yeeehaaaaa) and a dracula to suck my blood (pun very intended!)

It is a really simple set up in a really small corner I managed to find in their bedroom between their wardrobes and bookshelf, and it took no more than $10 for me to set that up. The children love the accessibility of the dress-up costumes hung at their height (you can adjust the pole longer or shorter, higher or shorter!) which allows them to dress up at whim! Oh wait, we need a mirror too, that I probably need to get at Ikea soon!

Did I mention, they also love the animal headbands that we bought for $2 at Daiso too? If you have a girl, this dress-up corner is all the more for you, all that is lacking is a vanity table!

This is part of a series of playroom transformations at low cost, do read part 1, part 2 and part 3 for more ideas! Also, coming up next week, the last and final installment of this series!

Part 3: Adding activity elements to our play area!

The third installation to our playroom required little effort, a small budget, but provided for lots of fun and learning opportunities at home. We live in a typical four room flat and in my opinion, is too small for a household of two preschoolers who treat every furniture in the home like a playground. Space is so little that we really need to make the most out of everything. EVERYTHING including the door.

The door to our playroom is also now a felt board. Only because I was walking around the entire room and house looking for a good area to hang up a felt board, and there was none. My walls are filled up with frames of family photos. In the playroom, shelves and cupboards take up all the floor space and at least half the wall space. In exasperation, I decided to use the door as our felt board area, because it was staring at me in blankness! It turned out well, and the boys love the idea of sitting on floor and playing with the door, or playing on the door, or whatever you want to call it. They just love the felt board area being at some unconventional place because it seems so out of this world!

So there you have it, a felt board done with just a piece of felt (no cutting required if you buy those Daiso ones) and a hot glue gun. You really just have to glue it on, and the door transforms into an activity panel just like that. Of course, I had to add some detailing with foam letters and some ribbon just so it looks pretty-ier.

My husband came home to this and shook his head silently. I bet he's thinking, "golly, this woman just takes every little bit of everything and makes it into a play area!"

Do read about Part 1 and Part 2 of organizing our playroom if you wish to see more ideas!

Part 2 of Organizing our play and learn area, we take our Lego very seriously.

One of the most played toy in the house would be the Lego. I see the boys constructing something with it everyday, and I thought to myself why not have it in a place where the boys had the most space and could play with it while the husband and I have some television time some nights. So, our lego area is not exactly in the play room, but we allocated some space in the living room for the building and construction fun. This is how it looks like:

I segregated all their building and construction toys into different boxes and made a Lego table out of our favorite Ikea lack tables. These were very simple to do actually, just hot glue a lego plate down onto the Ikea lack table, and you have a very nice lego space just for the kids! All for just $30. The lack table is only $12.90, and the lego plate costs $17 if I remember correctly.

I guess when you have an all boy family, you cannot really make do without a building and construction area. It's the boy's favorite place to be at, at any point of the day, and it also allows them to know that different toys allow for different purposes. I would have to say, the train tracks is the next favorite toy in the world, and we have a nicely spaced carpeted area in the living room for them to build the longest of tracks around and under our legs while the husband and I cuddle up to some favorite shows. That is about all the me-time we get, really.

In an effort to be more organized at home and letting the children have a nice learn and play environment, I am conscientiously clearing up junk and allocating proper spaces for play. Read all about part 1 of organizing the playroom here!

Part 1:Organizing the Children's Learn n' Play Room

Part of my new year's resolution if I actually had one was to clear up my children's playroom. It is also the room where they do most of their learn and play and spend most of their time in. Unfortunately, as a result of my excessive shopping habits and procrastinating nature, that room was pretty much left in a mess the whole of last year. New loots were simply stacked, until it reached almost ceiling high. Truth be told, I could not even remember some stuffs I had bought and kept until I brought them all out to organize early this year.

So this is part of my organizing the playroom in a homeschool house series, where things are organized in a manner that is kept low budget, and simple. Part One of this series includes a reorganization of all the things we owned and classifying them into different categories. This would help me (a homeschool mom) know where to get my materials, and the children (the homeschooling kids) understand the category or subject that they are learning or playing with.

This Laiva shelving unit was kept at a budget, and was bought from Ikea for only $29.90. It is just nice for keeping things that are not too heavy and I had chosen all our resources that came in light boxes to shelf nicely and neatly on this unit. Children could also see quite clearly from the box spines what each individual item is all about, and could pull out to play easily when left on their own. 

Everything was then classified under "Games/IQ Games/Family Games", "Language and Literacy", "Math and Numeracy", and "Science Concepts". That way, I could easily find something I am looking for when I intend to cover something in each category with the children. And my children could also identify the items that teach them math, or English, or science for example.

It is always brilliant to have things organized so that I do not look or sound like a cluttered mother, which honestly I have been since my children came into the picture. I blame it on time, or the lack of it, hah! Stay tuned for part two of my organizing the playroom series, I promise you it gets more exciting and cheaper too!