I am Mellon, and I just want to chop (clap) you up!

Lately it seems like all I've done here on the blog is babble on and on about myself, so I thought maybe I'd share a little random Mellon interior decorating tip today just to keep ya'll on your toes. Or rather, to give you a reason to come back and indulge my craziness a bit longer.

Anyway, I have a fairly nice sized family room, but it is oddly shaped with windows on two walls, a fireplace on one, two big openings, and only one uninterrupted wall. This can present furniture placement complications because

A) My husband insists that he have a direct visual line to the TV 

B) My kids have a plethora of toys and toy paraphernalia that needs to be housed somewhere

C) I want things to look as pleasing to the eye as possible given the constraints of A & B. 

So, to address problem B, I had gotten this lovely shelf from Pottery Barn. Before I show you the picture though, I want you to know that I had to go through a ton of photos trying to find one that had a decent view of this piece of furniture--a ton. Let's just say, I am not appreciating how Macs organize photos anymore than I am appreciating my lack of photo labeling skills. Grumbles were made, bad words were mumbled and at least one donut was consumed.  Now that you understand all of the sacrifice that went into finding this image, I feel you are ready at last to actually view it.

Functionally, this piece was perfect. It had lots of little cubbies for all of the little doodads and doohickeys that kids collect. Plus, it was aesthetically pleasing. The problem was that although it didn't take up a lot of floor space, I had to leave a wide margin of room in front of it so that my playful tots could get into those charming boxes and open those handy drawers on the bottom. This severely limited my seating options and decreased the amount of available romper room area. So, I had to come up with a new plan.

I knew that I needed to keep all of those cubbies, so I tried the shelf in several different locations in and around the family room. But none of the new placements really solved the problem while maintaining my needed 'prettiness factor'. So I pondered and planned some more, and here's where having a brain that functions a little outside the norm proved to be helpful rather than the deterrent it usually is. You see, I decided to chop that baby up. For reals. I took the top third off and turned it into this:

A lovely, little library for the wee folks. A couple of pillows, blankets and a stuffed friend or two and you have a cozy little reading nook for the under 3 foot crowd. Without the drawers to open, I could scoot my arm chairs back to free up valuable carpet area in the room. Brilliant if I do say so myself. At some point, I might look into adding some kind of feet to it. But not for awhile as I like the stability of it not having any legs to break since my two year old is a climbing monkey who engages in much jumping and bouncing. I'm hoping she'll grow out her death-defying ways in a year or so. Fingers crossed.

The bottom two thirds became this

 sofa table. Still contains the toy madness, but now also provides surface area for display purposes and drink holding. I was quite pleased. So the next time you're having trouble finding the perfect home for a piece of furniture, you might consider rearranging the piece itself, if rearranging the room has failed.  But just be careful if you're using power tools, we want to chop up the furniture, not ourselves. That's a funny one, ya.