De-baby-proofing the foyer

Carter will be 4 in January, something that kind of blows my mind. He's very much a little boy now, not remotely a baby or a toddler. And so we've been slowly taking down some of the barriers we put up when he became mobile.

One of the things I really wanted to do when he was a baby was to create a safe space he could play in and explore, without me having to constantly hover or police him or tell him "no". That worked really well for us, though it definitely made the house less than stylish, heh. I've seen so many HGTV shows where a team of designers goes in to re-style a house on the market, and they remove all the things that were so clearly put there to protect toddlers, often tsk-tsking at the poor homeowners utter lack of taste. I always think, "Well they don't have kids, do they?"

Anyway, one day last week we realized that Carter could open all the remaining baby gates in the house and was already going through them whenever he pleased, so keeping them up seemed sort of pointless. I took them down, and then realized that I wanted to reclaim another space in our house that had been bothering me for a while: the Foyer.

( Before pictures under here )

I had a budget of about $150 to work with, so I couldn't do much. I basically rearranged furniture and re-purposed some things. I spent a little money at IKEA and Target, and will hopefully have met my $150 budget once the items I put on Craigslist sell.

( Here are the after pictures )

I've really been in a de-cluttering frame of mind lately, and I'm looking forward to doing even more around here. The next big project is the garage, but that has to wait for it to get cooler. :-P