Apartment Guide Blogger Challenge & $50 Amex GC Giveaway (US)

2012

Last month we announced that we would be working with Apartment Guide for a blogger challenge to redecorate a room of our choice using $150. After discussing everything with my husband, we decided that we should focus on our daughter’s room. Over the last 3 (almost 4!) years, she’s acquired quite a bit of stuff, and we’ve been at a loss with coming up with creative ways to store everything we’ve bought her or that she’s been given as gifts.

I’m a little embarrassed to be showing off this picture of her room, but this gives you an idea of just how out of control things had gotten because we’d put off decorating for so long.

In the beginning, my husband hadn’t wanted to put dressers or anything hard that she could climb on in her room, so all of her toys have remained strewn around her room with nowhere to put them. We have plastic bins in our living room that contain even more toys.

Once I started looking around online for things I could use that would be decorative as well as act as organizers, I realized just how expensive things could get. Some toy boxes (that won’t even hold very many toys, when you really think about it!) can cost a few hundred dollars. Since I’m not very handy with sewing or building, I had to get smart and stretch the $150 to find more than one item for all of our needs.

First, I started by making a mental list of what types of things Zoe has to play with. Barbies and accessories, books, Hot Wheels type cars, books, and stuffed animals are the majority of her toys. After searching around on Amazon.com for a bit, I found some reasonably priced bookshelves and toy bin organizers:

I couldn’t find any stuffed animal organizers online that my husband and I could agree with, so our next shopping stop was IKEA. After visiting the children’s department, we found a fold-up toy box that I’m now using for stuffed animals/large hard plastic toys and storing at the end of her bed.

We found some cute round, mesh containers in the children’s section, but ditched those in favor of some larger ones that we found somewhere else in the store. They cost a bit more than the ones intended for children, but they also can hold more things. We bought 3 of those for about $7.99 each.

Zoe also couldn’t live without some smaller versions of those mesh containers, so we let her pick out a few. She can use them to transport smaller toys from her bedroom to the downstairs if she would to play downstairs instead.

I spent all of yesterday picking up her toys, vacuuming, and assembling her new book storage and toy organizer bins. Today I spent some time deciding what to place in the bins, toy box, and organizer, and am really satisfied with the end result.

I was really amazed with how many things we were able to purchase with $150 to get her room all cleaned, decorated, and organized. The book organizer and the toy bins complement each other well, and though the toy box and the mesh bags aren’t perfect matches, they don’t clash, either!

Participating in this blogger challenge has inspired me to try and replicate the experience with every room in our house. For great ideas on how to decorate on a budget, I will definitely be taking advice from Apartment Guide.

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Giveaway

1 Simply Stacie reader will win a $50 Amex gift card to put toward redecorating your own space!

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Disclosure Statement: Apartment Guide and owner Consumer Source, Inc. partnered with bloggers such as me to participate in their monthly blogger programs. As part of that program, I received compensation. They did not tell me what to purchase or what to say about the products used, and believe that consumers and bloggers are free to form their own opinions and share them in their own words. Consumer Source’s policies align with WOMMA Ethics Code, FTC guidelines and social media engagement recommendations.

Apartment Guide Blogger Challenge & $50 Amex GC Giveaway (US)

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