Kid rooms: the struggle is real

We moved into Matilda during the winter of 2020 - smack dab in the middle of the lockdown. My sons shared a room in our Brooklyn shoebox apartment so we didn’t have a lot of extra furniture at hand, let alone furniture that lent itself to online learning. We scrambled to find desks that would arrive sometime this century. Because my son’s room is tiny, the desk took up half the space…as well as the most of the furniture I picked out (cut me some slack - I actually HAD Covid at the time). Time to do some editing!

Before: This was way too much desk than my son needed and it became a catchall for the large amount of crap he accumulates

After: I put in additional shelving on the wall to remove the clutter and got him a gaming chair that actually fits under the desk

Before: This suitcase seemed like a great idea at the time, but it was bulky and lacked easily accessible storage space.
PS What in the hell was I watching?

After: I moved the TV and found boxes that were deep enough to hold the myriad pens, markers and erasers and banana flask he had in Desk 1.0

Disclaimer: I am anti-TV in any bedroom. It leads to all kinds of mayhem - unhealthy sleep patterns, depriving your ability to unwind at the end of the day, encouraging you to stay until until 3AM watching murder shows and the like. He only used it for gaming and I’d occasionally sneak in to watch maybe a murder show or two when he wasn’t there.

Before: This mishmash of hot mess express contained toys that hadn’t seen the light of day since ‘nam

After: I parsed through what could be kept and - surprise surprise - most of it fit into this bag. The rest…well, RIP

Kids Room Life Lessons Learned:

• Do NOT, under any circumstances, spend a lot of money on furniture for your kids’ rooms

  • Think IKEA, or garage sale…they outgrow it real quick (case in point, my son now wants this room to be a muted grey

• Edit, edit, edit then continue to edit

  • It’s astonishing how quickly broken toys, broken pencils and toys they’ve aged out of accumulate

• Organizize

  • I know…a common theme but hey, I am a professional organizer so it’s par for the course. I’ve found that if you de-clutter your kid’s immediate environment they - shocker - actually like that and might (for the most part) keep it that way

• Your kids are your clients but dirtier (at least in my case)

  • I had a vision! It was a gorgeous vision! I scoured, I parsed, I bled on the Google machine but doh! I forgot to ask if my kid actually liked any of my brilliant ideas and could have avoided having to re-do some of these things if I had.