Lego Bedroom

For the past six months or so, I have been on a mission to fix Bean’s room.  He had outgrown most of his toys and was still using furniture that came with his nursery set from when he was born!  Mostly, though, something had to be done about the Lego situation.

They. Were. EVERYWHERE.

Bean has a blessing and a curse in that his bedroom is almost the size of the master bedroom.  Thankfully, neither he nor Gracie have noticed the size difference in their rooms yet, but I’m sure that argument is coming in the next couple of years.  For now, having such a large room is awesome because you can fit a ton of boys in there to play and you can spread out and make a pretty decent sized mess.  But the downside is that there were lots of little areas around his room that were just not being used effectively.  His room always looks a little… patched together.

Unfortunately for him, Chris mentioned on Saturday that he was bored and needed a new house project to work on.  So, Saturday night, I got him good and happy with a few beers and then told him I thought we should redo Bean’s bedroom the next day.  He happily agreed (thanks, Mr. Yuengling!).  Then, this morning, I told Bean that we were going to fix up his room before Chris even got out of bed because Chris will say no to me, but he won’t say no to the kids.

Well played, Mrs. Brown.

Why, thank you!

So, that’s how we ended up hauling home a minivan load worth of Ikea bookshelves and desk pieces this afternoon.  We spent the rest of the afternoon assembling a 10-foot Lego desk for Bean.

He had a few issues that we needed our storage solution to solve.  First, he likes to build things and keep them, but he doesn’t want other kids messing with them when they come over.  We decided a bookshelf with storage space higher up on the wall would give him a display area for his creations and keep them out of the reach of friends when they come over.

We also needed to solve the issue of Legos always being all over the floor.  The 10-foot desk was the solution to this.  It gives him a huge workspace for his projects, and still leaves space to push everything aside and work on homework, too.

For storage of the actual Legos, we used a few different things.  I found these blue stackable bins at the Dollar Store, and they now hold a variety of commonly used Legos, sorted by color.

But we also left his giant bin of Legos under his bed, too.  It gives him the space to dig around for pieces and is easy clean up, and he can always pull the entire bucket up on top of his desk, if he needs to get to all of his Legos at once.

(Do you like his Lego quilt on his bed?  My mom made it!)

The last thing we did was add LED lights under the hanging shelving units.  My mom found these at Costco a few weeks ago for $20 and picked up a set for Chris and me to use wherever we needed.  We liked them in Bean’s room because you can choose between white, blue, green, and red lighting, and because they have a timer on them.  Bean went to bed tonight with the green light glowing on a 30 minute timer.  Perfect nightlight!

The only downside to this unit is that it literally replaced ALL of Bean’s other furniture in his room, so the other end of his bedroom is a little bear right now.  I think I’m going to get rid of his chest of drawers (which is one of the pieces that came with his baby nursery!) with a larger, more grown up dresser.  And Bean really wants a few bean bags in his room, so those will probably fill some space, too.  The other thing I still want to get is a giant Lego wall decal that looks like the Lego characters are jumping through his wall.  I’ve found them on Amazon, so that should be here soon.  I’m going to put that in the space above his floating book shelves.

All in all, the room is still far from being officially finished, but it already looks so much better.  And OLDER!  Chris is not too sure about it.  He keeps saying, “This doesn’t look like a kid’s bedroom.”  But what I think he’s actually saying it, “This doesn’t look like a LITTLE kid’s bedroom.”  Chris always needs a few days to warm up to new milestones for the kids.  Because he’s the cutest daddy ever.  

So, there you have it.  Bean’s new Lego bedroom.  I have now threatened to make him live outside in the backyard if I step on another Lego in his room from now on.

AND I MEAN IT!  Stepping on Legos is no joke!