March 5th, 2009
3… 2… 1…
Did I tell you that we were building a spaceship? It turns out that closets are the perfect size for a playhouse. Sure, when you’re living in roughly 950 square feet that could be useful storage space but really. If you could go back to your own childhood and choose between having a place to keep clothes and toys and spare sheets or your very own space ship, what would you choose?
If you opted for storage space, you might want to quietly excuse yourself now. It’s awkward. Sorry.
So! The design challenge:
- Make a children’s bedroom look as though people live there on purpose
- Give the kids a place to play on rainy days where they can safely jump and/or bounce and/or navigate their way into a black hole by jumping through time thus appearing to go faster than light if for only a moment
- Don’t do anything permanent or horrifying to the walls because this is an apartment and we’d like to get our deposit back someday without a crazy amount of work.
- Spend less than $50 on the entire project
These aren’t the greatest pictures, but here it is!
There are four stations: The Lab, The Command Center, Engineering, and Navigation. This helps prevent fighting and allows for one or two more kids to come over and play. I tried to include plenty of assorted things to push and do and wiggle and read to keep them interested.
Here is the Command center:
The lab:
Navigation: (that’s Graham operating the mapping system on his tiny etch-a-sketch)
Engineering:
Window to the outside: (The boys painted this together)
The door… I want to add round windows or something spaceshippy.
Here’s what their room looks like now. It’s hard to see, but there’s a flight path through the solar system drawn on the wall with chalk, and all the planets are labeled.
Oooh dang it, I forgot to take a picture of the fuel cell container. It’s a brushed metal toilet brush holder that was on the damaged clearance aisle at walmart. They have a pair of kitchen tongs for handling the radioactive material, plus safety goggles so I’m sure it’s alright. I handled radioactive fuel cells all the time when I was little and I turned out fine.
So yeah! Yay! They love the spaceship so far and I am dorkishly excited. Most of what’s in there was purchased in the automotive accessory department at Walmart, except the rope lights which were given to us by a kindly internet friend and the cushions on the floor. Those are six-inch foam cushions from an old sectional couch that my parents were throwing away. They’re perfect for jumping and bouncing and falling and maybe even sleeping on.
The posters on the ship’s wall are some of my larger prints that were damaged or creased, so we flipped them over and painted on them. The boys told me what labels and buttons they wanted – the only one I came up myself with was Flux Capacitor. They resisted, but they’ll understand and appreciate that one when they’re older. They drew circuits and all kinds of electronic things, and I painted the walls with verrry pale watercolor. Hopefully that will be easy to cover with a single coat of white when we move.
As for the room, those are vintage posters that decorated my dad’s room when he was a kid. The rug was a gift when Nicolaus was born. The boys’ quilts were handmade by Aunt Alisha and Internet Aunt Amy. The solar system was a project we did together.
Woooooo blast off!
March 5th, 2009 at 11:58 am
You have a flux capacitor! That rocks!
March 5th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Ooh, that’s awesome! I just can’t show Riley because he’d tell me to screw the storage space and make his closet into a spacecraft NOW. He has a space room, just no actual spaceship.
Since you’re arty and I’m… a botanist, can you think of a way to build a space capsule in the backyard? We might really need that.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Strapping explosives to the Internet now to blow it up so that Charlie never discovers what might have been had I been half so kickass as you.
LOVE. IT.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
i love you. will you be my mommy?
March 5th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Okay, I’m almost 30 and I’m totally jealous of your kids. I want a spaceship rocket closet! Oooh, or a napping closet. Just filled with cushions and maybe lots of flowers on the walls and little bookshelves and a reading light. I never got over the need for a super enclosed nap space. Man, I might go grab the sheets I just washed, throw then over the dining room table, and build me a fort.
March 5th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Awesome! No wonder you had to pry Nicolaus and all of his party guests out of there to open presents and do the whole birthday party thing :)
March 5th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
That…is the best. Ever. Of all things. The End.
PS: It might be time to introduce the boys to Dr. Who?, because if your going to travel in space? You probably are going to want to be familiar with the basic functioning of a T.A.R.D.I.S.
March 5th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Oooh. I really really really love the painting the boys did together. I’ve looked at it three times and I keep seeing something new!
March 5th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
this is SO SO SO SO awesome! your kids are sooooo lucky.
March 5th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
You are beyond cool! It’s amazing. And it HAS to have a flux capacitor.
March 5th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
you are such a great mother! i am in awe. (love the vintage posters…)
March 5th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
OMG, that is SO COOL! Flux capacitor, fluxxing!
March 5th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Forevermore I will always see what my closets are not!
March 5th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Wow, you may be the best mom ever. that is AWESOME.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Joy, they say it’s a nebula but I’m pretty sure I see the Flying Spaghetti Monster in there. :-)
March 5th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
Clearly, you are a far cooler mother than I could ever be. Wow.
March 6th, 2009 at 12:11 am
I’m really not sure “cool” is the word you all are looking for… especially since it’s possible that I go in there and play spaceship when the boys are not around. O_O
March 6th, 2009 at 4:19 am
Oh.. I wish I could think of something like that.. When I’ve moved house, I want to make a place like that for Max to play in. Now I need the house to look like grown-ups want to live there, and it’s severly restricting kids from wanting to live here.
And yeah, cool is the right word. From kids’perspective, this is about the coolest thing I could think of!
March 6th, 2009 at 5:24 am
Great job and I really like the idea of letting your kids co-operate! They must love their room!
March 6th, 2009 at 5:39 am
You truly are an awesome parent. I hang my head in shame.
March 6th, 2009 at 6:47 am
Just came here from reddit. Those are some lucky kids… I’m jealous
March 6th, 2009 at 7:03 am
I have five children,, and I love the idea. It really is limited only by your imagination, and skill with arts and crafts. MY only concern with your closet is the funnel for a viewport. In such a small area as a closet, if one child is looking out into the vast reaches of space, and another child bumps him from behind…. there could be a nasty eye injury on the Lunar-1 module.
March 6th, 2009 at 7:09 am
The real question is can it generate 21.1 Gigawatts? (pronounced jigga-watts)
March 6th, 2009 at 9:34 am
That is just ridiculously awesome. Can you come over to my house and turn my closet into a safari truck? And my son’s closet into a dinosaur research station? And the downstairs closet into… dang, we might need a little bit of storage space… Sigh.
March 6th, 2009 at 9:39 am
This is just so awesome, I hope to do something similar for my little boy when he’s a bit older and we can do it together….he already has a space themed room, but what you have done to his closet is just brilliant.
B
March 6th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Crazy amazing. Just goes to show what a few odds and ends and an imagination can do. Awesome!
March 6th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Go go Spaceman Spiff! That is KILLER. Love the flux capacitor.
We’re getting ready to paint one of our walls with chalkboard paint (??? – not sure the official name), but looking at this I’m beginning to feel like an underachiever. :-)
Shaun
March 6th, 2009 at 11:23 am
That’s so cute! You made your kids a place to get REALLY HIGH WHEN THEYRE OLDER!!!! :D
March 6th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Very cool idea. However, isn’t that red funnel acting as an external view port kind of dangerous?
Looks like it could poke out an eye.
March 6th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Looks great! Although I’m concerned that funnel on the wall may easily cause and eye injury if someone is viewing and gets bumped against it. May want to cut it down some so the circumference is outside the eye.
March 6th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
This is just as cool as my huge blackboard wall. Cheers for feeding your kids’ imaginations. :D
March 6th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
This is Love!
Thanks for sharing.
March 6th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Dude, wow. That is Teh Awesomez.
Seriously, what a great gift to your kids. You rock. :)
March 6th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
this is awesome. Pure awesome. I have to do something cool for my son now…
March 6th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
AWESOME spaceship!
March 6th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
I live alone…and I own my house…and I think I’ve just decided on a new design for the spare bedroom.
Now to work on space helmets for the cats.
March 6th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I absolutely think you need some of those glow-in-the-dark stickers for some portals. There are the sticker kind or the plastic kind that that that putty stuff to stick to the walls. If you don’t want to put the stickers on the walls then put up flat black paper that is like a window/portal with the stickers on it.
March 6th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
not to squash their fun but i think that they banned those rope lights in california because the plastic casing has lead on it and they are a fire hazard
March 6th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
E.T. was a botanist.
March 6th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
i may be repeating other peoples’ comments verbatim when i say this, but you’re the kind of mom i hope to be – the kind that can look beyond the inconvenience and the mess and the man-what-a-pain-in-the-ass-itude of a project and just concentrate on how awesome it’ll be for the kid(s). good job!
March 7th, 2009 at 3:42 am
[...] Photos: A closet turned into a space ship [...]
March 8th, 2009 at 3:46 am
I will never cease to be amazed by your amazing creativiy. Just incredible.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
*stunned*
That is so all sorts of rocking. I momentarily suspended my utter selfishness and thought about turning my closet into a play space for Maya and Arjun. Thank goodness that lasted only a while.
But it still makes me hang my head in shame…because you rock and I don’t.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
[...] continued, via electric boogaloo… [...]
March 9th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Why oh why did I forget to read you for a while? That is AWESOME. I swear not to forget to read you again, and to try to be as awesome a mom as you.
March 10th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
What an amazing idea. My daughter (now two) took over a section of her closet for a playroom about 9 months ago. She spends a lot of time in there, but her clothes are still hanging around. I never considered decorating the closet like this.
March 11th, 2009 at 12:50 am
Thank you, everyone. :-) The boys are loving it! And I have to admit, I’ve played in there with them and it’s pretty dang fun.
Bonus! Turns out it also helps if you have a kid who is afraid of the closet. Graham hasn’t mentioned monsters or alligators or anything freaky since we installed the ship.
March 11th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I love it! It’s kid heaven! My son has the same backpack – it’s one of the few things I’ve bought full price at Gap. We had to have it.
March 13th, 2009 at 2:13 am
just great;have small house and think i will get large tall box to fix up for when my grandson com in town and then i can flaten it ;to store after his visit; i thank you so much
March 13th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
This is a wonderful happening for your children. I am a grandma of 7 and love this idea. letting each do their part in creating a special room just for them. Thank you for this inspiring idea. Love the pictures too.
March 18th, 2009 at 8:22 am
Hey girl, you never cease to amaze me, still creative as ever. My kids would kill for a room like that, you need to write a book and put all your marvelous ideas in it and sell it, you’d make a million for sure.
Glad to have found your blog again, now I can keep tabs on you,lol.
Drop by and say hi sometime… http://mphphotography.net/blog/
Take care hon.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:48 am
Man. My parents never did this crap for me when i was little. I envy you.
January 18th, 2010 at 6:05 pm
Great article! With the recession in progress, I do hope that the space engineering advancements go forward in the near future!
January 18th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
Great article! With the recession in progress, I do hope that the space engineering advancements go forward in the near future!
The sense of space adventure in kids should always be encouraged!