Kid-Friendly Basement

If you read my post earlier this week about our Art Room and Playhouse, you'll remember my mom's piece of advice -Build a basement that works for our family, not a future home owner.  In addition to the Art Room and Playhouse, we made two other big decisions that made our basement kid-friendly.  

The first decision was to keep a large area unfinished for bike riding and roller skating.  As a kid, I loved going over to my Grandma and Grandpa's house and roller skating in their unfinished basement.  And before we finished our basement we used it mainly for riding bikes.  We have some pretty cold winters in St. Louis and it makes it hard to get the kids outside.  Having an unfinished area to ride bikes has been such a bonus!

 We made the unfinished space functional as well by building shelving around the perimeter of the room.

 Apologies for always taking pictures of my kids when they're in their PJ's.  It's how they're most comfortable and I can't say I blame them! 

 Tim brought a scooter down to the basement too - Dad's are so much fun!

I have to give credit to my mom for the second decision - Swings!  She hung swings in her basement this summer, which turned out to be very useful when the temperature hit record highs nearly every day and we were stuck inside!

Ava learned how to pump her legs to swing by herself a couple months after we hung the swings, and Sidney can now swing on the "big girl" swing rather than the baby bucket swing! If you have the space, I highly recommend swings inside!