The Reveal! A Montessori Toddler’s Room Complete with a Slide | One Room Challenge Week 8
It’s here! The final reveal of Benji’s room for the One Room Challenge!
I’m so excited to share all of the details with you and to show you how far we’ve come in the last 8 weeks.
Before we get to the reveal, let’s do a quick recap of why we refreshed Benji’s room in the first place (More on this in the Week 1 post here).
In our last home, Benji’s room was pretty rad, but since we had moved in March of 2020, we hadn’t done much but bring in his rug and furniture. Since we were trying to follow the advice of keeping a baby’s room just for sleep, we didn’t think about it too much. Over the last year, we would occasionally play in his room, but for the most part it was just where bedtime routine and sleeping happened.
As Benji got older (he turned 2 1/2 about a week ago), that association with sleep became problematic. By early September, Benji was screaming at the beginning of his bedtime routine that he didn’t want to be in his room. Denis started talking about ways to make his room a nicer place to be and I was immediately on board.
One of my biggest priorities for this refresh (aside from making it look awesome) was to make the room as accessible to him as possible—that meant putting as many of the features and functions of his room at his level as I could (this is a big part of the Montessori philosophy). As the room started to come together, it was a little jarring to walk in and feel like everything was low, but I kept reminding myself that was a natural outcome of making it toddler accessible.
Right when you walk in, the mirror is at toddler level. The only other mirror at his level in the house is a full length one in our bedroom (even the bathroom mirrors are too high for him when he stands on a stool), but now Benji can see himself whenever he wants and he loves it.
We wanted to totally transform the feeling of the room, and the mural definitely does that and more (it’s not an understatement to say that the mural makes the room feel magical). After I picked the wallpaper, I considered decorating the whole room with a jungle or forest theme, after all there are some really cute, ready-made options for that. But I wanted to push myself to do something that felt more original.
We removed his old rug, which felt a little too fussy/dainty for both the style of the room and his personality, and we brought in this gingham rug. I love the neutral, warm color and how the structure and size of the pattern contrasts perfectly with the organic shape of the trees. If you consider getting this rug, you should know that it does shed a lot, but you can’t beat the price and it’s pretty soft. The sheepskin rug on top brings in some more texture and another organic shape, and it really makes the room feel layered.
After he learned how to climb out of his crib, we converted it to a toddler bed with a side rail (about a month before the ORC started). But Benji wouldn’t sleep in it. Instead, he insisted on sleeping on the floor, whether his mattress was there or not. I was fine with no bed frame because that’s what I did when I was Benji’s age. But Denis was not familiar with this practice, and a mattress on the floor reminded him of prison cells, which he felt sent the wrong message about our parenting. So, we opted for the house bed frame, which basically just surrounds a mattress on the ground.
Let’s talk about the bedding real quick. I picked sheets with a microstripe because bigger patterns competed with either the rug or the mural. For his quilt, I needed a color that would bridge the blue of the curtains/dresser and the green in the trees, and this fit the bill perfectly. You can even see a tree with this minty color right above his new chair.
Speaking of his new chair… Benji struggled to climb into the glider that used to be in his room. But now, his new chair (a sophisticated take on a bean bag chair) is right at his level; and the chair combined with his table and lamp makes a nice little reading nook. Unlike toddler-sized chairs, this one is big enough that one of us can sit in it with him for story time and it’s sophisticated enough that he can use into his teen years (if it doesn’t get completely beat up before then).
Across from his chair are his new floating bookshelves.
His previous bookshelves were super inconvenient for a few reasons.
There were no walls on the sides of his bookcase, so the books had to be carefully placed (even with bookends) to make sure they didn’t fall off. Another problem with the old shelves was that they looked like a ladder, and one of Benji’s favorite things is climbing, so that was a fun new struggle at bedtime. With the old bookshelves, he used to take SO. LONG. picking out books for stories at bedtime. We assumed he was stalling to put off having to go to sleep, but as soon as we switched his books so he could see the front covers, all of a sudden he could pick out books for story time super quickly. This makes total sense because he can’t read the names on the spines of books, instead he needs to see the pictures on the cover to recognize which story it is.
I did move a bunch of the books that aren’t current favorites to a big basket in his closet because these two shelves can’t hold nearly as much; I knew that we’d have to do that and am okay with it because giving toddlers too many choices can overwhelm them.
Benji’s dresser is probably the least Montessori thing in the room, but I worked around that by moving the contents of the drawers around to be easier for him to reach. Now his underwear and shirts are in the bottom drawers, instead of the top drawers, so they’re more convenient to him than to us. His pajamas and pants are in the middle, and his spare sheets, etc., are in the top drawers. Benji currently has no interest in his choosing his own clothes and almost never opens the drawers, but now he has the option.
Moving on to one of the the biggest and best features of the room, the ladder and slide! I talk a lot more about it in this post (and why we only used half of the ladder), but it’s been so great to have and I’m so happy we installed it. Benji is an incredibly active little kid—like, constantly in motion—and I think the ladder and slide have helped him get out his extra energy and feel a little more calm in our home. It can also grow with him as he gets bigger; in a year or two, we can make the ladder its full height (it’s supposed to be 94,” or as tall as the window) and there are lots of extra add-ons that come with it, like gymnastics rings, a rope swing, and a rope ladder that will keep it interesting for him.
Overall, this room transformation has been incredible. And it’s not just Benji who loves being in his room now, we all do. It’s comfortable and fun, and I’m so proud of it—not only of the design, but also of making a space that he loves and that’s just right for him.
WHAT WENT WRONG AND WHAT I’D CHANGE:
It feels only fair to explain what went wrong and what I would change.
The Floating Montessori Bookshelves: We had a bit of trouble with the bookshelves (mostly my own fault). We installed the bottom shelves incorrectly. I think I mentioned in a previous post that neither Denis nor I are particularly good at attaching things to walls and this is a perfect example. We both forgot that when you make a hole for drywall anchors, you must use a drill bit that matches your screw size. Whoops! We used a drill bit that was slightly larger than the screws because we figured that would keep us from having to hammer or mallet the anchor into the wall so hard that it collapsed or cracked. But now the bottom bookshelf is currently hanging from the wall at a bit of an angle.
Normally I would have pulled it off and tried again, but when we started to pull the shelf off the wall, I saw the drywall being pulled outward with the shelf. I got worried that we were about to rip huge holes in the drywall, so we stopped. Because we’re renters and I wanted to keep the number of massive holes in the wall to a minimum, I opted not to install the second shelf. Instead, I stuck it up with some 3M velcro strips and took it back down after I photographed the room.
Originally, I ordered these shelves from Etsy because the Ikea ones were sold out, with no indication of when they would come back in stock (stupid supply chain problems). Well, they are still sold out, but I found them (overpriced) on Amazon and decided that might be worth it.
I’m also not entirely sold on the placement of these shelves. This wall feels a little out of balance, like there’s too much height on the left side and I need to do something to bring the eye up on the right.
The Bed: When we assembled it, we were a little confused by the directions, but thought we understood what to do. Unfortunately, it turns out we did not (Womp wommpppp). You can read more about that discovery here but, long story short, we assembled the entire bed incorrectly and will need to take it down and do it again. Because there’s a chance that we ruined the screw holes in the beams when we put it together the first time, we decided to wait until after the reveal to try to fix it.
The Art: When I first decided on the size and shape of the art, I had envisioned a different arrangement of the room in my mind, and I didn’t adjust my art plan as the floor plan evolved. Once I got the frame into the room earlier this week, I realized that things felt off balance. I think the big frame isn’t quite right anymore, and I may plan out a small gallery wall (including the alphabet poster, or a slightly smaller version of it) that will either go above just the dresser or above both the dresser and the floating shelves.
The Light Switch: This is a small thing, but I had planned to install a new light switch with a dimmer and put a toddler extender switch on it so that Benji could turn on the ceiling lights by himself. But, after turning off the power to the whole house except for the kitchen, the lights in his room still kept turning on. I was stumped and decided there were other things in his room I needed to finish, and never ended up going back to this project. I would like to replace the light switch at some point, but it’s not a top priority.
SOURCES
House Bed Frame | Similar
Long Sheepskin Rug | Similar Here
Climbing Ladder with Slide | Similar Here (With No Slide)