Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Five Girls, One Room.

Some would say we have a pretty small house, especially for the size of our family. It is a little over 1600 square feet, but it is space well used. Suprisingly there are four bedrooms. One is downstairs and acts as our guestroom. Three are upstairs. I like to keep all my people on the same floor, so the three upstairs bedrooms hold all of us. Dave and I have the medium sized room. Jack has the nursery, which is supposed to be a den because it has no closet, but it is a great size for 1 (or 2) little guys. The girls, all five, share the master bedroom.

Most people who come to visit our house want to know how we fit all the girls into one room. Here is the answer!

We removed the doors from one end of the closet and it was a perfect place for a little princess crib. Our one-year-old, Georgia sleeps here.

Our ten and eight year olds share a bunk bed.

Hallee, our eight-year-old has the bottom bunk. We hung a little planterbox-type shelf for all her treasure and curtains for her to close.

Sydney, 10, has the top bunk. She also has a shelf, plus a corkboard for pictures, drawings, etc. We recently put this little set of drawers up on her bed for anything else that needs protection from tiny hands.

Leynie and Lexi, 5 and 3, have toddler beds opposite the bunkbeds.

We have one dresser in the girls' room for the bigs. It is old and hard for the littles to get the drawers open, but not a problem for the bigs. PERFECT!

You may be wondering where all the "stuff" is. Well, for starters we try to keep our stuff to a minimum, especially because we have a total lack of closet space in our house, but there must be SOME stuff.

We keep all the clothes for the three little girls in our room (when they were in their room every drawer would be emptied every day. ARG!). Our 5 and 3 year-olds wear the same size so they share a drawer, plus the small drawers for tights, leggings, etc. Our one-year-old has her own drawer in the same dresser. The drawers are really big and have plenty of room for all their clothes that do not need to be hung up.


We hung a second bar in our closet for the little girls hanging up stuff. This GREATLY decreases the clothes thrown on the floor, not to mention broken hangers.

For Christmas I made this dress-up bin for the little girls dress-up clothes. The bottom holds, shoes, purses, hats, etc, and the top holds the dresses and aprons. It fits perfectly just outside the closet.

The second half of the closet in their room holds the big girls' hanging clothes, a bin for American Girl stuff and a bin for other doll items. It also hold all the American Girl furniture, and doll house furniture.




Between the bunks and the wall was a bit of spare space. We made it into a playhouse for the little girs, since the little cottage we have takes up too much space in the room.

All the toys that have pieces, Playmobil, Legos, Little People, etc. are kept in an armoire in the Living Room and can only be accessed upon request. Moving all that stuff downstairs has really made it SO much easier for the girls to keep their room tidy. The toys they can use in their room are limited and do not have a million pieces, so they are easy to pick up quickly.

I HAVE to mention my favorite part of the girls' room. The bedding!! I REALLY wanted all the beds to be coordinating once we moved them all into the same room. I had a gorgeous crib set, handmade! And I found some cute duvets from Pottery Barn that I knew I wanted to use for the bigs' beds. So I bought a set of coordinating sheets from PB and some minky and mailed them up to Alaska to my extremely talented friend who had made the crib set. She used the new fabrics plus some of the fabrics from the crib set to make duvets for the little girls' beds. Voila!! 5 coordinating beds! LOVE IT! Then I used fabrics with similar colors to make a curtain for the window, the curtains for Georgia's "room" and the curtains for Hal's bottom bunk! The girls' love their room, and so do I!

7 comments:

  1. That all looks terrific! You've been hard at work!

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  2. WONDERFUL organization! I love the little planter box.

    Hallee

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  3. Thanks girls. We've started calling our Hallee, "Little Hallee Homemaker" because its just so cute!

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  4. What a great room! My dad was one of 16 kids and the whole family lived in a 1200 sqft house - 10 boys in one room!! Can you imagine??

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  5. i am one of 10 kids,4 boys and 6 girls,all of us girls share a room (a very small room) we have a Great big bunk bed that we all share.i love the girls room,it's so beautiful!


    ps,i came to your blog from the raising homemakers Blog!!!

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  6. Very creative with the space you have. I have five, 4 girls and 1 boy. poor him...lol

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