A busy day

[were_gopher]

I've been looking at Jodies room lately, mostly at the lack of space caused by the mixture of hand me down furniture and poor layout, and finally decided this week to do something about it. We spent a rainy day midweek measuring out the room and the furniture then sat down with a pad of squared paper and a ruler and made a plan of the room with cutouts for the furniture.

One of the major problems of this room is it is actually five sided having been made of a chunk of the attic (which the previous owner divided into a medium size bedroom, a small bedroom, a toilet with a large sink and a small landing) and so has a sloping roof and the door at an angle in order to fit in. What would really increase her space is a high sleeper with a workspace and storage underneath but the roof is too low so what we did instead was move the bed round to the end wall where it doesn't stick out into the room anymore and then bought a new desk with some drawers to replace the oldfashioned school desk and the set of drawers and found a slimmer bookcase so we could put that against the wall instead of having it sticking out at the end of the bed. The desk comes with a small bookcase at one end so she's still got about the same shelf space. The only down side is why do they make desks where the sides only come up less than half the height of the front inside the drawers. I'm going to have to scrounge round for some tubs to put her art supplies in. One of the drawbacks of buying from somewhere like Argos is not finding this out until you've opened the box.


                  OLD                                            NEW


I think she has at least half as much room again and the lighter wood of the new stuff make it feel much more open as well. The desk is now under the light instead of off to the side and the big round bucket of cuddly toys is now a toy mountain kept in check by the foot of the bed and a couple of strategic choices in ones to stuff on the end.

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Question: will the new layout work better if you swap the bookcase and the desk, so that the bookcase is by the bed (and her chair is further away from the bed rather than right next to it)?

[were-gopher.livejournal.com]

Not really because of the sweep of the door. We needed the slimmer bookcase in order to get enough room. There is enough room under the new desk to tuck the chair right under it or alternatively it can be put at the end of the bed at night as a clothes hanger.

I've actually got the bed and the bookcase a little too long in the first picture. The door opens inwards.

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

Do you need ice cream tubs then?
I'm sure they'll enjoy emptying it to make room for the art supplies

[were-gopher.livejournal.com]

Ice cream tubs is one thought for the long term, for now I'll probably practice my origami and make little boxes.

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

If I hadn't just used some up for art supplies myself you could have had a couple.
Iceland do nice big 4l tubs which my mum used to use for toys, food and everything else that would fit.
As the toys are in the corner with some cloth and rope you could make a hammock that would get them off the floor for hoovering.

[were-gopher.livejournal.com]

What I want to try and get for the cuddlies is one of those folding laundry baskets because the frame should just fit in the hole. Something like this http://tinyurl.com/npexjc

As for art supply boxes I've asked the paper shop if they can keep me the plastic boxes things like fizzy lances come in, they look like they should be just the right size and Jodie can get busy with stickers and suchlike to customize them.

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

If I wasn't off sick I could offer shoe boxes or other cardboard boxes from T K Maxx!

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Slight glitch about the desk drawers, I think. The sides and rears of the drawers are half the height on the front, which means stuff can fall out. Right?

Corrugated card, adhesive tape, and optional sticky-backed plastic. Same idea as "greedy boards" on a farm trailer.

[were-gopher.livejournal.com]

That's the other consideration, I've got some old cardboard boxes that can be cannibalized.

[eoforyth.livejournal.com]

We have all this to come in the not-to-distant future, and while we don't have a roof slope to worry about, we have the oddity of having to reach one bedroom by walking through another :/

Although you couldn't use a high sleeper with desk space underneath, could it be an option to have a cabin bed (which Catherine is okay with, although she doesn't like heights), which can come with open space or drawers underneath, and would have the advantage of allowing her to store art supplies away next to the desk?

[were-gopher.livejournal.com]

I looked at cabin beds but they were just too high to go under the lowest point of the slope (which is where the cuddly mountain is now) and would block the radiator if I'd just replaced the standard bed with a cabin one. The desk is ok in front of it because the heat can come out from under and I can still reach the thermostat. Only possible problem is if the box of wax crayons gets to the back of the drawer, instant giant rainbow crayon potential there.

My grandparents had a cottage where you had to walk through two bedrooms to get to the third. It was so old a house that they found wattle inside the brickwork when they punched a hole through for a pipe. The builders reckoned the place had been given a brick facing about 500 years ago when the row of cottages next door were built for the customs officers. Since the cottage was called Church Cottage and was next to the (possibly) Saxon church then this is entirely possible. The only way they could block off the rooms for privacy was curtains because the whole place was listed.