Making An Arts & Crafts Room For The Kids

Some of you will remember that way back in January, Sherry talked about grabbing these wood chairs from Target on Instagram Stories for “a side project we are working on that we will share after we complete the bathroom.” And then the bathroom dragged on for a few more months (you can see the wrapped up product & full budget breakdown here) and somewhere in there this big thing happened too.

So while we have been enjoying this fully new room for a few months, we are excited to AT LAST share the update with you folks. So let us show you around and tell you why we chose to revamp this room.

The space you are looking at is in fact our old guest room, which you may remember looking like the picture below. Around the time we were thinking about redoing the middle bedroom at our beach house, we began to realize we had the exact same issue at home: we had an whole room that was only being used a few days out of the year, if that. Mostly… not at all.

The big couch in our bonus room doubles as a giant bed, and our friends & family prefer sleeping in there because there is a TV and more space to spread out. Hence our guest room never truly being used. We also realized we could consistently put our kids together in one of their rooms for a night or two to free up an extra bedroom for guests if we needed one (that is what my family consistently did growing up). And when we floated the idea of an art room past our kids, they were extremely excited.

So back in January, before this whole moving-to-Florida plan bubbled up, we chose to turn this room into a space that was more useful to us on a daily basis. And I gotta say, with the kids school being cancelled for the rest of this school year (as of an official announcement by our mayor yesterday) and them being at home with us every day, it was fairly strong timing, even if it seems like a weird change to make right before deciding to move. We are SO GLAD we did it.

In addition to making that room about 500% more functional, it also relieved some slowly growing sticking points from our own home office downstairs. We have generally enjoyed having our kids art space in our office with us, but they’d most certainly outgrown the kid-sized desk we had in there (and those compact chairs that were only around 8″ off the ground).

And because the desk and chairs were too small for them (and that space on the wall would not truly support a desk large sufficient for both of them with standard sized chairs), it meant that their crafts and box creations were taking over more and more of the room with every passing month. You can see more of the takeover in the “Real Life” highlights on Sherry’s Instagram profile.

Does every kid or family need a dedicated art room? Nope. But our kids spend a LOT of time drawing, cutting, writing, cutting, gluing, and somehow doing even more cutting. Also taping. So much taping. And when we realized we in short had an unused room upstairs simply sitting there waiting to be turned into one of the most hardworking spots in our house, it was ridiculously straightforward to sell the bed to a friend and list the side tables on Facebook marketplace, which left us with a wonderfully bare room to turn into the space that you see below.

Plus, with a solid door that we can shut to hide the mess (and with it not being the room you see right away when you enter the house) those brought in benefits have been strong too.

So that is kind of the thought process behind this room, let us get to the details of how we executed it.

The Oversized Art Desk

The number #1 priority was giving them a more expansive workspace. For EIGHT YEARS our kids have used a small desk that we made out of an old door from our first house. So in short the desk that we made for our daughter when she was one was still going strong (she’ll be 10 in May) but it was getting cramped to say the least. Even her little brother (he’ll be 6 next month) frequently simply drew on the floor because there was not much room for two bigger kids to sit down and work together. Simply picture a nine year old sitting on the left side of this desk…

I cannot say that Sherry did not cry a little when she sold the kids chairs & our handmade desk to a neighbor with younger kids (it was surprisingly emotional to see those go), and in the new upstairs art room we chose to go wall-to-wall with a desk. That would give our kids plenty of well-separated workspace (emphasis on well-separated) while also adding more surface and drawer space to wrangle paper, markers, and other supplies. The bases of our roomier-desk-for-two would be three of these ALEX drawer units. They come on casters but they were not tall sufficient to make the desk a standard height…

So we hacked them a little, thanks to these $20 sets of metal sofa legs. They come in varying heights and finishes, so we snagged three sets of the 5″ black ones and easily installed them where the casters had been. Especially straightforward and it made them the ideal “table height” to work with any sort of normal desk chairs or dining chairs you might be planning to use.

For the desk surface we hoped something:

• Lightweight (we did not want to stress these Ikea pieces with real stone)
• Affordable (duh)
• Durable (we did not want to worry about kids making messes on it – that is literally the whole purpose of an art room)

The solution turned out to be this faux-marble laminate countertop sold at Ikea called EKBACKEN. I know “faux marble” and “laminate” can sound kind of cringeworthy but we were truly impressed with it when we saw it in person at Ikea.

In fact, our original plan had been to get this solid-white version of it but the faux-marble won us over in person because it looks so good. And it is $20 cheaper per piece than the all white option!

We needed 2 six-foot pieces to span our three drawer bases (they also sell eight-foot pieces, but two 6′ ones worked best for our setup). It means we have a seam in the middle, but it is largely hidden by art supplies, and even if it were not, we are not losing sleep over it. Not a big deal at all.

To secure the countertops we simply had to remove some of the top drawers and then we screwed up through the top of the bases, into the bottom of the counters. This not only keeps everything in place, but it also helps to minimize the seam by holding the two pieces tightly together.

Here is one more shot of the faux-marble counter so you can get a good idea of what it looks like. We heard from a few people after sharing a photo of them at Ikea in IG Stories that some of you have used them in your kitchens and offices and enjoy them. In our experience so far, they wipe up Especially easily, so even when the kids get marker or paint or glitter glue all over them (yes, that has happened at least three dozen times) we do not have to stress. It all wipes right off. I do not think a Sharpie necessarily would, but gel pens and paint and stuff come right off.

The drawers have been ideal for wrangling arts & craft supplies, which was the reason we went for these bases. We grabbed a few of these plastic drawer organizers to keep things separated inside of each drawer. Back when we completed the desks in January, our kids had a blast going to Michael’s and spending some of their Christmas money on various supplies to stock up their drawers. Googly eyes were clearly a must.

Sherry kept most of the drawer organizers in place with her patented move, which is simply using some 3M command strips on the bottom (so they do not slide around). We also left a couple of them free to be lifted out so the kids can put them up on the table or the floor when they are working on something.

The Display Space

One fixture of the previous art space (aka office) was our giant Hands-on cork board. We enjoy having a spot to display our kids’ artwork and we know they value having space to show off their creations, so we chose to move that function up to this room as well. Simply feels pleasant to have it all in one place.

We had considered repeating that same giant cork board method (you can see our walkthrough for that here), but we opted to try these $15 pegboards that also caught our eye while we were at Ikea. They ended up being a lucky decision because they do a lot less damage to the wall and are straightforward to move – which is suddenly extremely applicable.

They come in a couple of distinct sizes and finishes, but we thought the cork-toned ones would add some pleasant warmth to the room. They each hang on a rail that is installed behind the top of the board (requiring simply two holes each) and they have pegs at the bottom that assist them float off of the wall a little bit.

They also sell a variety of pegboard attachments (shelves, hooks, bungees, containers, etc) but we simply grabbed white clips to display everything.

Speaking of artwork, we chose to repaint the room a lighter color (Behr’s Irish Mist) simply because it was the only dark room in our house, and I think after nearly 7 years of that color we were ready for it to be light like the rest of the house. Our go-to rooms consistently seem to have light walls and colorful art – so that certainly made sense for in here. The kids even helped us paint this room! They both did a strong job rolling while we cut in – and we were twice as fast with twice as many hands working away! We did need a lot more drop cloths, but we lived to tell the tale.

The Floor Space

The thing that is hardest to capture in these photos is that we left most of the floor space totally empty – aside from this rug. Since their go-to activity lately has been to make cities and mansions out of boxes, we hoped to leave them ample space to do that. Or, you know, to take on whatever other activity that requires room to spread out.

They tend to like to build one “box city” for a few days and then start over from scratch (you can see some of their creations here), so we did not have much going on back when the room was freshly done. They had turned their attention to making “stuffed animals” for a hot minute by drawing on two pieces of paper they’d cut out and staple together, forming a pocket to be stuffed with a paper towels to make them “puffy.” I believe they were inventing a board game below (the pipe cleaners are the pieces or the money, I am not sure).

We also grabbed a couple of nearly-matching bean bags from HomeGoods because they were begging for bean bags in there too. It was remarkably hard to find good bean bags that were not hundreds of dollars (I am looking at you PB Teen) but HomeGoods came through in the clutch.

Ours in fact had Plenty of them and we were able to get two in the same color/material, even though the patterns were slightly distinct. And they were only about $25 each. The kids use them a ton, so they are certainly coming to Florida with us, right along with their new desk and chairs. The strong thing about not building anything into this room (you know, nothing is attached to the walls or floor) = we can take it all with us!

So that is a little peek around the guest-room-turned-art-room in our house. It is now used for hours every day, which feels extremely good considering we created this space and then were like “we are moving – ahhhh, should we have left that a guest room for resale?!” The answer is: “yes, likely” but thankfully we sold the house right away even with an art room (more on our house-selling process here) – and we printed out an old photo showing that it used to be a guest room to assist people picture a bed in there if they hoped to use it that way. All’s well that ends well. Especially if you work in googly eyes somewhere. And string lights. Consistently string lights.

P.S. To see some other kid-related projects and spaces we have done, there is a whole archive full of that – and here are a bunch of crafting & art related projects too.

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