How We Organize Kids Clothes with Four Kids in One Room

Our kids are all still sharing one room.  We made that decision almost two years ago now and even when we moved again, they got moved into the same room again.  They LOVE it.  Last week I mentioned to Anthony that maybe we should consider moving Sebastian and Gianna into their own room since the girls have been wanting to stay up later ("since we're older") and we're almost getting closer to the point where they could stand to have their own space with some privacy.  But you guys, they really love it so much that we both came to the conclusion that it's not quite time yet.  

So, in the same room they stay.  But, as you can imagine, it's not the easiest as far as logistics go.  Their room isn't tiny but it's definitely not huge either (I think the measurements are around 12' x 13').  The two sets of bunk beds fit fine plus the long dresser that holds most of the clothes but that's about all that fits.  And really, that's all we need to fit in this room.  Next door there's a dedicated play room (that will eventually become Sebastian and Gianna's room and even farther into the future, just Sebastian's room) and all of their toys are corralled there, so there's no need for a toy space in their bedroom.

With four kids though, comes a good amount of clothing, as you can imagine.  I have really purged and learned to intentionally buy clothes they really need in the past few years so their stash isn't as big as the twins' once was - they had a whole lot in their first years.   We're not minimalists (yet?), more capsule-wardrobe fans, so I can truly say they don't have an over abundance and it feels really good.  And, it's the only way this whole set-up would work without having to overflow into another room.  :)

Four Kids, One Bedroom

I get asked often enough how well our kids do sharing one bedroom and if there are any tricks we have up our sleeves to make that transition to bedroom sharing.

Well, we're not pros on the subject (or anything else regarding parenthood for that matter, ha!), but with a year and a half under our belts of successful sibling sleepery, we'll tell you the whys, whens, and hows we've found to make it work for us.

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:

String Light Nightlight | DIY

It's the very end of July and therefore, finishing up the kids' room is first on the agenda.  I've got one tiny little thing left to do and then I'll snap some pictures and get those fun afters up here!  I'm going to sneak ahead of myself quick though and show you one little corner.  This one:

That, of course, is what it looked like prior to a whole bunch of wallpaper removal and wall sanding, popcorn ceiling removal, you know, alllll the things.

Here's what it looked like a few days ago (and ha!  It's even changed since then with the addition of some new art!):

I'll get the current situation up with the room reveal but let's talk that lit star on the wall.  In our rental, the kids had this big lamp on their dresser that was uber cool but also, uber heavy.  It was great for awhile until they started thinking they could turn it on (the knob to turn it on was on the very top of the lamp and pretty much out of their reach) and started reaching and pulling the cantilever part down, down, down.  Not my most kid-friendly piece of functional decor, that one.

#letsroomtogether

So I started something...

It's been something I've been wanting to start for a good long while now and the timing has never been right.  And to be completely honest, I'm a little overwhelmed with the thought of moving forward with it right now but it's all going to be ok, right? 

It's called...

Why?

I've had this nagging feeling for the past couple of years that I've just been in a mode where I complete a room and then I write up the big reveal, throw a few tutorials in there, and call it a blog.  And it's all great!  I know so many of you have found inspiration in my ideas (said as humbly as I can) and it's motivated you to get down and dirty with some DIY in your own space but still, I feel a lot of the time like I'm just "showing off" what I did and because I'm a big secondhand buyer, I can't always jot down all of the links and sources for you to do the same and so sometimes it all feels one-sided.  It's the same with Instagram and sharing over there...even more so sometimes.

So, I wanted to come up with something to involve YOU more in what I'm doing over here.  Something that will provide inspiration and support and just a whole lot of fun.  With our new house and all of the rooms needing attention, it's the perfect time to get everybody in.  :)

Gender-Neutral Kids’ Room Reveal!!!

The kids’ room is FINALLY done!  I won’t get into why I’m late again because maybe you already know but hey!  The kids’ room is a real kids’ room now – not a small brown box of a space.  It’s happy and fun and so, so cute.  And I can’t wait to show you but first, let’s trot down recollection ave because you can’t really appreciate where it is now without seeing where it was.  :)

When we moved into this house, we tried something new – we moved all four kids into one room together.  It’s by no means a big room (maybe 11’ x 11’) but, with them all in one room, all of their toys could then be tossed into the other spare bedroom in the house and get labeled “playroom”.  So, squeezing beds and a couple of dressers in wasn’t a big deal in a small room since toys didn’t have to fight for the space too.  Bunk beds were a crucial component but I’ll get to those later.

Here’s what their room looked like before we moved in:It was dark and ultra brown, just like every other room in the house.  This room doesn’t get a ton of light, especially in summer with the higher sun plus a tree stands almost right in front of the window and blocks a lot of light.  It’s great for sleeping though.  #halffull

After we moved in, those darker curtains went and the kids slept on an air mattress until we could build them some bunk beds (you can read more about those plans here).  A month in, we still hadn’t built those beds (le sigh for a busy life) but we were given a set from some good friends.  With that set plus a toddler mattress slipped underneath as a trundle for Sebastian and Gianna’s crib in the corner, the kids slept soundly for months.  Or did they?  Welllllll…kind of.  The thing about that bunk we were given was that it was big and awesome but there was only one side rail up top and it was low and the girls were afraid to even go up much less sleep up there lest they roll over and out.  So they shared the bottom twin.  Sound sleeping?  Questionable. 

(In the above pic, we had taken the rail off the top and not added the ladder so the adventerous two-year old didn’t go on a climbing spree as she’s highly apt to do.)

But then we got the deal of a lifetime (slight exaggeration…but only slight) on a new pair of bunks and finally, everybody had a bed.

That fact was fantastic, fine and dandy except our kids were still sleeping in a boring room and it didn’t have to be that way.  I wanted them to have a space that felt fun and that they loved retreating to.

So…

One Room Challenge–Week 2

Week 2 of the ORC is here and, amazingly, I’m right on schedule (all the thanks to the two chicklets who have been taking awesome naps)!  My goal was to get the kids room painted before the week was over and bada bing, bada

BOOM!  Here’s what their room looks like right now!

Yep, week 2 also saw me, not only painting their room but “bedazzling” their wall with diamonds.

I CANNOT WAIT to show you how those diamonds came to be and I will in my next post (pssst…it’s CHEAP & EASY!), but before I could even get to that fun part, I had to cover up the tan walls.  If you’ve ever painted a kids room before while it was being inhabited by said kids, you know, it’s muy inconvenient.  To get to the walls you have to completely upheave their room – move beds, dressers, whatever else they use on the daily.  For us, that meant moving the furniture from one side of the room to the middle one day and the other side the next day.  It also meant moving the kids into the play room and our room to sleep for a few nights.  (This is why, if I get the chance to paint before we move into our next house, whenever that is, I WILL.)