Photo essay: Decluttering and creation one fell swoop
In which I get slightly handy.
Today’s post will be a photo essay of my weekend DIY project transforming a messy no-man’s-land into a LEGO room.
My daughter’s bedroom closet is really narrow and deep (a shape we all know I struggle with), and I was never able to figure out how to set it up for clothes storage. This room was my WFH office during COVID, and then it became a room for cast-off toys.
Last week I decided to turn it into a LEGO room to support my daughter’s burgeoning interest.
Below is where we started. “Art table” in foreground, LEGO heap and random discarded items in background. Lots of scraps of paper and debris on the floor at all times.
It was always super messy, and the LEGO pieces would get everywhere. Never one to let a mess persist, I hung up a curtain so I didn’t have to look at it. (When you can’t get control of the mess, just don’t look at the mess, amiright? I have a history of deploying curtains when all else fails.)
As I’ve covered before, our dining room table has essentially become our household’s art table, so we didn’t really need another one upstairs. I realized I could convert the current art table into a LEGO table if I added some edging to keep the small pieces from sliding off.
This was the inspiration, $300 from Pottery Barn.
And here’s my homemade version:
This is just 1/2x1” edging from the hardware store, affixed to the surface with double sided 3M tape for easy removal later. I then added corner screws to create a strong frame shape. My husband cut the pieces to size with his miter saw, but a hand saw would also have worked just fine. The pegboard clipped onto the back is from IKEA.
And here we are—grand reveal!
I was able to get rid of the rarely used table and random clutter behind the curtain. With the freed up space, I relocated our bin of too-big and out-of-season kid clothes from the basement to this room where we might remember to ever look through it. Bonus!
This was a really satisfying project because I was able to declutter, repurpose existing furniture rather than buy new, and create something that supports a new interest for my daughter.
Hopefully this inspires some ideas in your own home! What are you working on these days?
Lego organization tip I got from my Lego builder in-laws is to sort them by size and type. We still have to clean legos up off the floor but it decreases dumping to look for one piece. And then it’s easier to find what they are looking for. For example, sort out all of the minifigs and accessories, large bricks, 2x1 bricks and smaller, and tiles. I prefer sorting to building so I’ve even sorted smaller pieces and put them in small plastic containers from hobby lobby but my son will open the drawer and find exactly the piece he is looking for.
You could also screw a horizontal line of deep molding to the left-hand wall, with a lip sufficient to support a book, and place one or two lego-build project books there, for inspiration. That way they would be at-hand, but not cluttering the surface of the table.