Design Solutions For Children

I don't understand how people make cute rooms for their kids. Once in our last house I set up a little closet with bins and a shelf for bookbags, like you see in magazines. I started to detect an odor after a while. It was kind of a rotten egg smell. Eventually I found the origin of the smell. It was a rotten egg. Sam brought an egg home from school and put it in his little cubby.  I need a design solution for that. I also need a design solution for boxes of rocks and also for boxes of boxes. My daughter has a nylon pouch that her camping hammock came in. She stores dog food in it for a training session she had with the dog about a year ago. It's under the sink in her bathroom (of course). Ben uses his nylon hammock pouch to store his buttons. I'm not sure where Maggie's hammock is, but Ben's is wadded up on the back porch with some mildew on it. It cost $50. I paid extra for the "slapstraps" which allow you to hang the hammock anywhere. Last time I saw the straps they were lowering a nude Indiana Jones doll wrapped in blue painter's tape off the balcony.

We have this little room upstairs with built-in shelves which I hoped would serve as a playroom, but the kids never went in it so I moved all their junk out and put my treadmill in it. I say that like it didn't almost kill me to move the treadmill through 2 doorways and an L-shaped hallway. A few days after I set up my home gym I discovered that a white board, school supplies, and several scarves had been moved in there. Today I went in to use my treadmill and found that Sam had raised the incline as high as it would go, set a wooden chair on it, and plugged his iPod into the treadmill speakers. There was also an empty mug and a plate with chocolate cake crumbs on it. He excitedly told me he had set up his own home theater. I'm sure in his mind it was like this:

Once I saw a really cute pink Radio Flyer wagon on a blog so I bought one for Christmas. Ellen stuffs it with couch cushions and makes the kids push her around in it while she bellows "I'm a granneh. This is mah wheel cheh," in what she thinks is a grandma voice. It does not hold crocheted elephants or wooden blocks.

There is an orange extension cord coming out of my crawl space. It powers a TV, DVD player, and lamps throughout my unfinished basement which is decorated with everything from rugs to #10 cans which I have stored down there. There is even a glass vase filled with fake cherry blossoms in the middle of a coffee table along with a tent and a cot. I don't know what to say. I don't think my kids and I are particularly slovenly or that I am particularly permissive with them, but our aesthetic is off.