Oops, I did it again…
(Thank you Britney. While I couldn’t give you role-model status, you will forever be a part of my teenage years.)
I signed up for the One Room Challenge!
My brain is still not sure why my fingers signed up BUT, we're going to go with the flow over here and cross another room off of our to-do list. The great thing about the ORC is it provides LOTS of motivation!
So, the room we are going to tackle is…
the kids’ room!!
This is what it looked like a few days before we moved in. Basically an extra, extra, extra, extra large cardboard box with a window.
I feel bad for my kids because, though they don’t seem to have noticed or mind, their room hasn’t been the happy place I've dreamt for it to be; that it SHOULD be. I’ve read that, upon moving to a new place, getting kids’ rooms put together should always be first priority so that your kids have a much better transition from old house to new house. Maybe it’s a 21st century wives tale but it does make sense, however, like I said above, our kids don’t seem any worse off or seem to mind that they sleep in a tan box. And maybe symptoms exhibit themselves months after a move in which case maybe we’re in big trouble. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Either way, it is about to go down in their room and I am so excited!
When we moved into this house, we really wanted to create one space where we could keep all of the kids toys instead of a few different places which made it easy for toys to be scattered e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e alllllthetime. Since this house is a three-bedroom, that meant maybe making one of those bedrooms a toy room, one the master bedroom, and then scooting all four kids into one shared bedroom. At first, we didn’t know how that was going to go over especially since, at the time we moved, Gianna was still waking up at least once every night. On one hand, we didn’t want her waking everyone up when she woke up (because when she wakes up she makes it known…girl’s got some pipes) but on the other hand, we thought maybe she’d feel more comfortable sleeping with everyone else vs. by herself and maybe, just maybe that would keep her soundly sleeping all night.
Aaaand, spoiler alert, it made a HUGE difference in her sleeping. One week in this house and she wasn’t waking up at all anymore. It was kind of amazing and probably not ironic. She just likes company while she sleeps. Me too darlin’, me too. :)
Anyway, this is what their room looked like a couple of months ago:
It’s hiding a little but there’s a crib mattress under that bunk bed that we pulled out every night where Sebastian slept. The rug is a hand-me-down from my sister – it was left in the house they bought a couple of years ago and it’s thick and the perfect medium for a project I’ve been planning.
The big ‘ole wood bunk bed was handed down from a friend and, since we were thinking of going the bunk bed route anyway, it was such a gift to have one set given to us. But, the bed was so big and tall that none of the kids would go up top. So, we ended up donating the bed to a good cause and making serious plans to build our own. We both love the IKEA KURA bed, as does the rest of the internet but sadly, we don’t have an IKEA near us and shipping a pair here was a little too much. For a night or two, we also toyed with buying two of these in white. They’re the most affordable options we found with the streamlined, no frills look we were going for. But then I found these plans to build our own IKEA look-alikes from Ana White. We signed ourselves up right then and there, made a shopping list, and Anthony starting heading out to some home improvement stores to price out wood.
He ended up buying the particle board we needed at Lowe’s and we found the best deal on the wood for the beds at a local lumber store that we couldn’t get to until the week after all this was happening. BUT, he had to leave on a trip the weekend following that week and while he was gone, the kids and I made a quick trip to Dirt Cheap where we found…
dun, dun, dun…
a pair of $400+ bunk beds being sold for $110 each!
I snapped a picture of them to show Anthony later but am now realizing how silly that was considering the man’s seen a cardboard box before… *eye brows go up nice and high*
I really didn’t know what to do in the moment. I didn’t want to up and buy them because I wanted Anthony’s opinion first but he was out-of-state. I also couldn’t buy them at the time because me + all four kids + two very large, heavy boxes of bunk bed parts? NO. And then of course, sometimes (thankfully pretty rare for us) you get what you pay for at Dirt Cheap. Sometimes boxes are missing pieces or something’s broken. Case in point - we bought Sebastian a bike for his birthday last year from there and, even though it looked like it was in a brand new box that had never been opened, the two thick metal bars that held the front wheel were so bent the wheel couldn’t even be installed. Anthony tried bending them to where they were supposed to be but the metal wasn’t budging. So we lost $30 on something that was obviously damaged, repackaged, and sold. Oh, and Dirt Cheap has a no-returns policy. I didn’t want to spend time, $$$, and lots of bodily effort to get these beds home just to realize, “Oh shoot, IT’S MISSING AN ENTIRE SIDE!” *Cue the maniacal frustration.*
So, I put on my best overwhelmed mom act (totally kidding…kind of) and told a mananger I was interested in the beds but that I was hesitant in buying because of the possibility they were missing parts/broken/etc… Thankfully, seeing how overcome with love for my kids and their need for bunk beds I was she was awesome and told me that they’d give us 24 hours to bring the beds home, set them up to figure out if there was anything wrong with them, and bring them back if so. SOLD lady. I mean, I’ll send my hubby in next week as soon as he gets home (IF he thinks we should get them)…and meanwhile, I’ll be in a contant state of FOMO, hoping that no one else nabs these before we do.
Welp, here’s a pic of the kids’ room a month ago:
Those bunk beds? Nothing wrong with them minus a few scratches here and there. They are these bunks and they are awesome. Besides the fact that I really didn’t want dark wood bunks, they’re super sturdy and the posts are about three times thicker than the bunks we thought about buying at Walmart (not to say that those aren’t good – they’ve got great reviews!) While we liked the height of the IKEA bunks we were going to build, these cost us $50 less per bed in wood costs AND they separate into two twin beds, something I think we’ll find handy when Sebastian has enough of sleeping in the same room as his sisters. :)
I’m still nailing down plans for their room that will continue to evolve over the next six weeks and of course, as they do, I’ll fill you in. I DO know for certain that the walls are getting the same coat of white (Pure White by Sherwin Williams) as the rest of the house because we have it, because there’s that wood trim again, and because there’s not a ton of natural light in this space. Hopefully when I check in with you on this room next week, those tan walls will be a thing of the past.
Fingers crossed and paint rollers ready.
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