Imagination Station

When we moved into our townhome we were excited to have a very large living room. We decided to make part of it a play area for Eva so that all of her toys would have a home that was near the living room/kitchen/dining room but somewhat out of the way. The location of our cable connection affected the location of the TV stand and the direction which the couch needed to face. We ended up having a perfect little nook for Eva's toys except for one problem - there was a fireplace right in the middle of it. I was okay not using the fireplace and decided that we'd find a way to cover it up so she wouldn't be able to crawl inside of it. My parents had an old bookcase that was in my room growing up and said that we could use it for Eva. Yeah! Then I got a few ideas of what to do with it. Yes, we could leave it as a bookcase and put her books on it....she does have tons of books but I thought that I'd rather leave them in tubs right now because it's easier to contain them. We have other bookshelves in our house and I knew that she'd just want to pull the books off all day long. So it might become a regular bookshelf again one day, but not now.

My next idea was to turn it into an awesome play kitchen! I love the one shown here from Nap Time Journal where she just added items found in a local thrift store and around the house. I figured I could do this cheaply and easily plus Eva already has some mixing bowls and measuring cups to play kitchen with.

My other idea was to turn it into a dollhouse. I like how this blog (not written in English) used contact paper to make each room unique and I actually have old dollhouse furniture that my mom has saved to pass down to Eva.

As of right now all I've done was find some cute fabric at Walmart that I added using a spring rod. Along with the 2 ideas from above I'm also considering either leaving it as is so that it can be used in different ways depending on what Eva wants to play  ( I call this idea Imagination Station) or waiting until Eva is a little bit bigger and letting her decide what she wants it to be. Hmm.... so many fun ideas....what should I do?