You, Me, and ALL these Kids: THE addition

We moved into our house in November 2010.

As you know we have 5 children between the two of us...there are three large bedrooms in this house. Did you hear that? Dunt, dunt, duuuuuuuun.... we had to figure out how to make this large, wonderfully located, house fit our family.

First we put up a temporary wall in the large front room/ formal dining room. The biggest boy got those fabulous digs. This would have probably worked for the long haul but we really wanted to let each child have his/her own space.

So, built out the garage.

I looked at space planning sites online and found this one: Planning Wiz There are several on the inter-webs so don't stop until you find a free one that makes since to you.

I had some decisions to make. Who would get the garage rooms? What is the best arrangement for these rooms?

Regarding question 1. It would be easy to put the oldest children on the other side of the house but then the two little boys would still have to share ANNND the oldest two could almost come and go at will...

I did spend a large amount of time trying to make that work. I hated the idea of the little ones being to far away from us but I really hate wasted space. Passionately.

So after messing with this plan for a while I decided it would be a better use of space to put the three little kids in the garage with a playroom than the two big kids.

Here's my logic. The little kids don't hang out in their bedrooms. They play together. Sooooo if they only need space in their rooms to change clothes and sleep those rooms can be rather small thus leaving space for a playroom.
Sleep in the bedroom, play in the playroom.

Here's what that arrangement looks like:

We ended up opening the wall between the formal dining area and the garage to allow a pass through. This makes the addition feel like part of the whole house and not an afterthought.

We kept the colors pretty neutral except, of course, for a beautiful Robins Egg Blue on the wall you can see from the front room.

The little kids love their rooms. No big kids allowed. They share their toys for the most part but they do each have thier own shelves to store personal toy items.

We added artwork along a theme for each child. More discussion on that topic in the next post.

We put a television and the VCR/DVD combo in the playroom so they can watch kids stuff when friends are over. The original door to the outside had a window in it which let's tons of light in and the space is airy and bright.

Here are pictures of the process.