Cohabiting: working and playing together

Couple Living with Kids
3 br
HDB (Maisonette)
≥1,500 sqft
Modern Farmhouse

If you have kids under 6 you'll probably know by now that they stick to you like glue. We learned this when our older girl was a toddler who refused to stay in her play area, and a playpen had to be big enough to fit an adult that can be together with her. Working from home was hard, it was a wonder how we ever survived Covid Lockdown in our previous space. Needless to say, mess was not well contained. So with this house, we planned a room to be used for all kinds of work and that works in progress will remain in a place designated for it.
This is how it looked like when we first moved in with all the furniture. Our friends annd families have checked us out rocking this Muji bookshelf in all sorts of configurations. We've decided on this 3 by 4 cavity this time round. Everything in this room was recycled from our old place because we are very much attached to our furniture that is still serving us well. Even the ceiling fan and lights! You will soon realise that there are no other built ins for this room. Fun fact: when you handover your sold place, all fixtures in it has to stay by default, but a gentlemen's agreement made between us and the new home owners allowed us to dismantle them and have our electrician install them in our new place!
This shelf used to house so many of Missus's books but they were all sold and given away when we switched to ebooks. The children had their books at the lower shelves and we used boxes to keep documents and memorabilias for the lowest shelf to avoid the children having access to dusty floors while picking their literature. If you have been to the national libraries, you'll notice some shelves switching to place book covers facing children. This is to provide ease of browsing, retrieval and placing them back. We found liewood crates and ikea's organisers reasonably pleasing and useful for such purposes.
We have a six year old who is into legos, and into craft making. She has junk everywhere because she is a maker who makes things for the fun of it. So literally, pieces of cut paper that served their purposes continue to lie around and i have devised many ways to upkeep them. I finally conclude that drawers are good for dumping things and Spotlight's storages were perfect! the fact that they are shallow also meant a limit for any dumping, and since it is shallow, you are likely to be able to see all contents of the drawers! We sort by the item's function like all kinds of papers, all kinds of stickers, pencils and markers for our bigger drawers we put things that have more items such as "things that cut" (scissors or all kinds), "things that stick" (tapes and glues), "playdough / kinetic sand things" (moulds, bottles of sand). Two carts for craft, and one cart for all her lego bricks.
It's also been tried and tested. Sorting by colour is a foolproof way to get children to keep them independently. We bought Lego sets that are fun to make upon unboxing. As much as it pains the adult to see how they get all mixed up with the other pieces, I assure you that children who spend more time with the pieces and manuals actually know what they are doing with the pieces. ✨Trust in their Play✨
With children, we wanted to train her to use the space and housekeep it more intuitively. Where things do not feel confined to where they are but just be there because they belong! This is actually a trolfast storage bench that has been turned upside down because of the little ledge that can keep the toys on the surface.
What used to be the playpen is also now just the play mat. Both our kids do use this space to play with construction toys like train tracks, magnetiles and megabloks.
With the carts on wheels, our little one is seen to push them around to help make her work easier. We love visions of her being so independent with the materials around her.
And we got a little round table for us to work on. Can you spy another sussex cart? It houses all other electronics and an extended monitor screen for us to plug our laptops in. There is seemingly no permanent workspace because we have found that it doesn't work so much for us. It is one rule to housekeep this arrangement: keep everything when you are done!
We love how this room has given us a space to work either by ourselves or together. With no built ins, it help us plan to review the use of this place again once the girls are all grown up a little bit more. But right now, this shall be where we work and play.