A Room With(out) a Purpose

If you happen to pop over here to read my musings about my walk with the Lord, I hope you don't mind a diversion from that today.  You see, I am really loving this blogging thing!  It helps me sort my thoughts out more than I ever imagined.  And one of the things on my mind of late is what to do with a little room we have that is right off our living room.  The problem is there is no furniture in there and no function to the room.  There is a piano in there that we inherited but no one plays it.  We have a relatively small house when you consider that 5 people live here, the idea of wasted space makes me a little cuckoo!

Right now, whenever the kids draw or do crafts or homework, it is at the dining room table.  This means that my dining room sideboard houses not only china and tablecloths but also markers, glue and scissors.  The dining room table, where we eat all our meals, always needs to be cleared of artwork or scraps of paper before meals.  We do have a very small breakfast nook off the kitchen but it has been repurposed into a tiny office space.  In my master bedroom is a computer armoire that does not fit in the breakfast nook.  It basically just takes up space in our bedroom and houses stuff that I have picked up and thrown in there in an effort to make the house look neat in a jiffy.

It did not take me long to come to the conclusion that a craft/study room is just what we need and that room would be perfect for it.  The only problem is that the room only has one wall without a window.  The other two walls have large picture windows and the last is open to the living room.  So, that means the piano has to move and the only place with space for it is the dining room.  Not ideal, I know, but not so bad that we continue to let precious square footage sit unused.

So here are some pictures of the room as it is right now.

Since the budget for this project is pretty close to nothing, almost everything in there will have to be pulled from other rooms.  Here's my preliminary plan:

• The piano moves out to the dining room and the computer armoire goes on that wall.
• The desktop and all its accessories move out of the breakfast nook and into the armoire.
• Buy the legs for an oak table top that was given to us by some friends and place that in the center of the room.  Place some buckets atop the center of the table with pencils, markers, etc. I want to make sure it looks like a craft/study room at first glance and not an eating area.  (I would prefer to have a white, circular pedestal table in there so I will keep my eyes open for a find like that.)
• Buy 4 chairs for the table in fun, whimsical colors again going for the craft/study room look vs. an eating area.
• Pull in from the dining room a small china cabinet my dad made for me many years ago and repurpose it to house school and art supplies.  I have recruited my mom to make some simple curtains to cover the glass panels so the supplies are hidden from view.
• Buy or make a prayer bench to place under the windows on the back wall.
• Depending on how much space is left, possibly move one of our armchairs from the living room to a corner in this room for a cozy reading nook.
• Eventually purchase a small area rug to warm up the space.  

I am so excited about this project because we will not only gain a functional room but it will clear space in some other rooms to make them more comfortable and practical.  I am pretty excited about getting the breakfast nook back to it's intended purpose, too!  I'll update the blog as the redo progresses :)