We are planning to have a belated fifth birthday party for Small in a few weeks because the August bank holiday means most of his friends are away on holiday. This year we have decided to have the party here and he has been planning it for weeks but anyone who knows our house will know it's rather over crowded with stuff.
We have moved the furniture around in the front room and made much more floor space which is also good because Treestump is starting to move about, not crawling more throwing himself about but still moving quite a bit. We still need to clear a few piles of stuff but the moving about has made some shelving a lot more accessible which helps.
We also currently have the last bit of flooring in the back up while we put in the underfloor heating and have to get the new floorboards down before the party !.
We have been trying to sort some better storage particularly for toys so got some Trofast storage from IKEA which is basically frames into which slot plastic tubs and you can chose which combination of size of tubs you get. We only bought some tubs, not enough to fill the frame though we already have some upstairs in Small's bedroom. The plan is the top layer is for spare tea, t-towels, placemats etc and the lower layer is for toys which will get swapped around for boxes in the bedroom as the boys decide what they want to play with.
This unit sits just outside the kitchen and has the tea making stuff ie kettle , t-bags etc and the bread prep area so that breadcrumbs don't contaminate the food prep area and make me ill. We used to have a tall boy there which was narrower than the new unit.
Until now the area by the back door has had a book case next to the sewing machine storing sewing and other craft bits. I realised this was the same width as the tall boy so I have combined them into a narrow dresser. The contents looks rather scrappy as it is random boxes and so forth currently but it is twice as much space for crafting bits and you can never have enough space for such things!
In case you are wondering the back door which should be in the space to the left of the dresser is currently boarded up hence the strange triangles you can just see in the space.