Kids' Room Reveal-ish

The kids' room is...not done.  I spent every chance I got during the month of July to get their room in order (and some of you guys played along with the #letsroomtogether challenge!) but in the end, I couldn't make up my mind about a couple of things and so I'm just going to walk away to the next room (find out what it is here!) and I'll come back to this one later.  That's how I work.  I can't make split-second decisions most of the time.  I mean, I have a hard time making multiple-second decisions.  Haha!  I mull and mull and then usually, all of a sudden, I catch this wind of inspiration and make something happen.  So it goes with this room.  Things take time.

But, in saying that, we've come A LONG way.  Let's start at the very beginning...

When we bought this house, the kids' future room was allll pink:

Our first line of business was to get those popcorn ceilings scraped but amidst getting those down, we were also slowing ripping the wallpaper off the walls in here.  We took down the chair rail too to make things less formal.  

Unlike all of the other wallpapered rooms in this house, this wallpaper fought, and fought, and fought me coming down cleanly.  I tried every method I could find - the steamer, white vinegar, fabric softener, actual wallpaper remover, a paper tiger, and mixtures of some of those...you name it, nothing helped.  I mean, the wallpaper itself was coming off but it was taking the primer behind it with it in parts, leaving us a pock-marked wall...not pretty.  

It was definitely not a texture we wanted to see when we went to paint the wall.  The awesome part about all of this was that this room also won 'The Most Wallpaper' award in the house.  Perfect!  The most wallpaper with the most problems.

We had a few options after we got all of the paper off.  We could either take the steamer and carefully steam and scrape off all of the primer (which we actually think might just be paint...aka a poorly prepped wall) but that would literally have taken weeks.  We'd probably still be scraping and the kids' would be roomless.  We also thought about finding some new, thick wallpaper in a neutral pattern and just wallpapering over the walls.  But then we started the search for wallpaper and holy moly, we were looking at spending, on average, $500 just for the wallpaper for the entire room.  Yipe.  And nope.  In the end, we laid plastic over the carpet, taped it to the baseboards, and took a palm sander with coarse-grit sandpaper to every square inch of the wall.  

Yes, it made a MASSIVE mess.  Anthony sanded and he looked like he just walked through a severe dust storm upon leaving the room.  In the picture below, you can see the left wall sanded and the right not sanded.  You can also see all of that fine dust that kicked up when sanding, all settled nicely on the floors and every other flat surface.

Anthony sanded a wall a day for four days (it took him 30-45 minutes to sand one wall) and I won't talk about how our sander died halfway through the last wall on the last day.  RIP.  No worries though, a quick trip to Walmart where we picked up this el cheapo sander* (which, surprisingly, seems to work just as good as our more expensive, now dead sander) brought our spirits up and the rest of the texture and dust down.

Here are the walls, sanded and smooth to the touch:

To ensure there wouldn't be any future peeling or bubbling post-paint, we used this special primer made specifically for problem drywall (it goes on clear so it's a little tricky to apply and make sure you get everything covered) and then painted with a thicker nap roller that minimized any texture that was left behind.

It's kind of hard to tell, but the walls look awesome.  I took this while the paint was still wet to send off to Anthony, praising him for the good job he did sanding.  :) 

 

You'd never know their past.  Let's just congratulate them on on their conversion, shall we?  It's never too late to turn your life walls around folks.  ;)

After that, we painted the crown molding and baseboards and moved the kids' furniture in.  We also replaced the ceiling fan after the old one started sparking one night...that was fun.  😲 

Anyway ladies and gents, welcome to the room in the house that has gotten the most attention since day one.  We are so very happy to announce that it has finally reached it's livable destination.  And, I might add, it's a cute one, albeit simple.

The only thing missing is a little pattern on the curtains.  I bought these black out curtains* (I lucked out getting both pairs for $32 on Amazon warehouse!) with the intention of painting them but then I couldn't decide what to paint on them.  I debated diamonds like the accent wall in the kids' old room because I loved it so much and could bear to live with it for a few more years.  I debated stripes, dots, a stencil of some sort...but I just wasn't in love with any of the ideas I was coming up with.  But, like I said above, that idea will probably just come to me one day and the next day, I'll have my paint brush in hand.

Remember how I mentioned in this post that the crown molding was gaping in quite a few places?

Well, thanks to a good amount of caulk, it ain't anymore.

Here's another corner before:

And now: 

(If it looks like the window above is majorly fogged, it's because it is.  Over half of the double-pane glass windows in this house have fogged over time and need to be replaced.  We had a window company give us an estimate during our first week here and, yeah, we'll be doing it ourselves slowly and over time.  As a matter of fact, we've already started.  Can't stop, won't stop with the DIY.)

    

If you saw my Instagram story last week about how I attach drum shades to our ceiling fans (it's here if you missed it!), you might've noticed I (once again) switched out the shade.  I spent a good amount of time making this polka-dotted shade by hand-painting dots on a plain white shade...

But after living with it hanging up there for a few days, I just didn't love it.  It was cute but maybe there were just too many dots with the dotted sheets on the beds.  I don't know but, in the end, I just took the mustard yellow tassels off the old shade and replaced them with a double round of this colorful tassel trim from Hobby Lobby.

Another before:

After:

You can get the tutorial for that string light star here.  All of the new artwork is courtesy of the kids and an afternoon painting session (washable paint, of course).  :)

 Outside of that window, the previous owner had hung a bird feeder and, while it had been taken over some time ago by a large family of wasps, I had never thought of doing that before!  

It's really so fun and a great idea if you have kids!  We evicted the wasps (which consisted of me taking the bird feeder down with a long stick and RUNNING far away until they vacated their fallen home), cleaned it out, and filled it with fresh seed.  The kids' LOVE watching the birds flit to and fro.  We even grabbed a hummingbird feeder after and have plans to hang it in another window of the house.  Soon we'll have our own mini-aviary.

Here's the before of the last corner:

Here's where it was pre-closet purge/organization (there's a whole post about that coming up!):

That over-the-door organizer was so great to store their shoes in in our little rental but I don't like over-the-door storage if we don't need it.  With some moving and shaking, building, and a whole lot of painting, I present the most fun part of this whole entire room (in my humble opinion)...

Zee closet.

I'll go into more details on another post but I'm so very proud of this little closet space.  Anthony was gone for ten days recently and it forced me to step out of my norm (which is sending my building plans to him to execute) by cutting and building my own shelves.  Girl power!  :D

Thanks to being able to use a bunch of leftover supplies from other projects and selling this closet system* we used in the kids' room in our rental, I shelled out about $5 to take this once beige, scuffed up, and boring closet (I can't find a before picture...ack!) to a fun and whimsical one.  <3 p="">

All of the trim around the doors in this room got painted too but, as you can see above, the doors didn't yet.  I had time to paint them and was just going to slap a few coats of white on them to match the trim but then I wavered and thought...what if I don't go white with the doors?  Maybe a pale, matte greige would be pretty?  Or even darker than that?  I love white doors and they're classic and safe but, I don't know, do I want to be safe here?  Stay tuned for that decision and, if you have any recommendations on door paint colors, I'm all ears.

More sources:

wall paint:  Pure White by SW in eggshell

ceiling paint:  Pure White by SW in their Master Hide flat

trim paint:  Pure White by SW color-matched to Valspar in semigloss

rug:  a dyed hand-me-down (tutorial here)

bunk beds:  these* via Dirt Cheap

dresser:  thrifted

elephant painting:  Hobby Lobby

ceiling fan:  Lowe's

The sheet sets and buffalo check pillows (which convert into sleeping bags...so cute!) are all from a Target clearance rack.  

Buying paint (of which we have lots leftover), curtains, and new curtain rod finials brought this makeover to close to $100.  Everything else was just moved from the rental to here and/or another part of the house to here.  The curtain rods themselves used to hang in the rental's dining and multi-purpose rooms but I bought new, simple finials at Dirt Cheap for $5 for all four.

I feel like this post is bordering novel status on just one room so I'm going to quit there and call it a day.  But, one room in one month.  I can only hope I'll make this much progress this month on the next room.  Phalanges crossed.

Psst...If you roomed together with me, I'd love to see how your space turned out.  If you didn't absolutely cross that finish line, like me, it's ok!  Any progress is good progress!  

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