We are lucky enough to have a playroom for our 3-year-old son (formally a dining room) - something that I LOVE! It's awesome to have all of his toys in one room, and in a room that's close to everything else. Unfortunately, it's the first room that you see from our entryway.
Because it's the first room that you see, I really wanted to have it "decorated". Most of the time it's covered in trucks, cars, tools, and drum sticks...but at least it is starting to look cute! The wall that I wanted to tackle today is about 8 feet wide and is a totally blank slate. Due to the wall size, I needed something that was pretty substantial...but didn't want to pay a substantial amount. Here is a "before" photo of the wall...and I'm totally keeping it real here with the toys on the floor!
Grayson loves to read and has started correctly identifying a few letters. Being a former teacher, I wanted to encourage his beginning letter recognition by incorporating the alphabet into the decor of this wall. I thought of a few different options, then happened to run across a blog post about decorating a nursery with alphabet flash cards. What a great (and inexpensive!) idea!
I found these flash cards at Michael's in the scrapbooking section. With a coupon, they only ended up being a little over $4! Amazon also sells these if you're interested! They are super cute, with relatively muted colors, and awesome animal facts on the back!
Given my "decorating ADD", I knew that I didn't want these to be a totally permanent fixture in the playroom, but I wanted them to stay put until it was time for me to take them down. :) I was looking for a different type of mounting strips, but came across these Resuable Tabs from Scotch. They are AWESOME! They are specifically for "lightweight mounting" but would be perfect for hanging posters, etc. AND you can reuse them! These ended up costing a little more than the cards (I think they were around $6), but that's a good price considering you can reuse them!
I headed home with all of my supplies and waited until Grayson would be out of the playroom for a little while. :)
Here comes the fun part....measuring and making sure the cards are level. Ugh! I measured the wall and found the center point, then decided how far apart I wanted my cards to be. I ended up with 1 1/2 inches in between each card, which worked well for my wall space. Here are the first 2 rows up on the wall!
After a little more measuring, removing, and making sure the rows were semi-level, I had all of the cards up on the wall!
Grayson and Scott came home just as I was finishing up with the wall. Grayson must have liked them because he walked in and said "Those look nice, Mom!" That's a pretty good compliment from a very busy 3-year-old! Ha!
We spent a little while cleaning up the playroom and did a little re-arranging. Here is the wall after, complete with a 3-year-old playing the drums!
So for just a little more than $10, we now have large-scale wall "art" that's educational! Decorating on a budget works for me!
There is one other wall in the playroom that is screaming for a little decoration. I'll show you in the coming week how we are going to decorate that wall on a budget, too!
How about you? Any great budget decorating ideas? We'd love to hear from you! Link up or leave a comment!
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