Nursery to Playroom Makeover- Dress Up Closet

We are in the process of turning the nursery into a playroom.  We have moved the girls into a room together and so far they love being together as well as having a room just for them to play in.  I will be doing a series of posts on this transformation because it's been such a fun project for me!


One of our first ideas was to take the walk-in closet (no idea why the smallest room in our house has the biggest closet!)  and transform it into a dress up room.  This idea was borne out of several issues: 1. they love to dress up and we have lots of dress up items that we were struggling to shove into the dress up box that we had, 2. the closet had become a messy storage area for me and I really wanted to organize it and make it more functional, and 3. the nursery/playroom is very small and using the closet almost doubles the size of the room.

I started by taking the door off to open up the room.  Also, that leaves the section of the wall that would be hidden by an open door unobstructed and it's now been turned into an activity wall (a later blog post about that!).  I had some extra trim paint which I used to touch up where the hinges were.

Our first issue we had to address was storage.  I needed a dresser for Maggie's clothes that would fit into the closet.  We sold our nursery dresser (I didn't really like it anyway) on Craigslist and bought an inexpensive, but cute dresser also from Craigslist.  It was already painted pink and was perfect!   I also needed some storage for the top of the closet.  I keep a gifts box filled with toys I find on clearance ready for the many birthday parties the girls get invited to.  I also needed something to hold some of the larger toys the girls have (tunnel and tent from IKEA, specifically).  I found those two hot pink baskets at Home Goods.  The little basket between them holds Maggie's nebulizer and equipment. 

The next issue was hanging a second rod that was lower so the girls can reach it and hang the dresses up themselves.  That was no problem for Robbie and now the dresses are all within reach of the girls!  So, now the dresses are hanging and the hats, shoes, fairy wings, masks, jewelry, etc are all stored in the box.

We used the mirror that used to be above the nursery dresser by turning it on it's side and mounting it on the wall at a height that the girls can see themselves model their outfits!

The girls are loving their new dress up room and I'm loving that the dress up clothes and accessories aren't scattered throughout my living room as they're playing!