Time Machine - Girl’s Room

So let’s take a trip back in time briefly to 1996; 16 years ago this coming weekend we moved into the house on Marvin which we purchased in June.  We’d been married for not quite two years.  This was our “starter home” and though we were expecting our first child the place was huge for just the two of us during those months of waiting.  Sometimes I wouldn’t even go upstairs for a whole week and then I’d think that maybe I should go upstairs and visit it just because it was there.  We knew we would have a few children before we moved out of our little 1100 square foot home and so we had left both upstairs bedrooms somewhat empty and we ourselves decided to use the dining room as a bedroom.  After all, we didn’t want to get used to room that we didn’t really have.  Ha!  Ha!  That was our thinking then and boy did that turn out to be smart.  So in a house with just 3 closets we stored our winter coats in the closet of the larger of the two bedrooms and put our computer and sewing machine and the like into that room while the smaller of the two bedrooms was to be used for a nursery for our new baby.  And that worked out well for us until we discovered two years later that it was time to consider moving our “office” down to the basement in order to move our two year old little girl into it as her bedroom making room for our new baby.    Our Nursery was decorated in blue and white with farm animals; perfect for a boy or a girl since I never desired to find out the gender of any of my babies ahead of time.  And so this larger of the two bedrooms was going to be pink.  Now we would have a pink room for our girls and a blue room for our boys if it worked out that way.  And by divine intervention the space/décor worked to our advantage since over time our larger room served our larger girl population.  There was no way of planning that one.  Besides which we never thought that we would be raising five children in this little house.  1996 was a different time for us and for the world!
So we had this upstairs office that was painted white and had old blue carpeting.  The carpeting kind of smelled funny and the paint had “wrinkles” indicating that it was covering up some old wallpaper that was started to shift and wrinkle crackling off in a couple of places.  And due to the shape of the room that sits under the eaves someone in the past history of our home had decided it would be a good idea to put that real paper wallpaper up across the ceiling as well before painting over it.  So in early 1999 as my middle began to swell we decided to tackle that room as a redecorating project and was one that would take us three months to complete.  Ah!  The joys of home ownership.

After pulling up the carpeting and extracting each and every carpet staple from the old pine floor together Rick spent a great many evenings in January, February and March scraping wallpaper off of the walls and ceiling.  Getting that painted over wallpaper off involved chemicals and some tools that looked as if any Ninja warrior might be proud to add them to his arsenal.  This was a huge painstaking job that was very physical, very boring and felt like it was going nowhere fast.  Awful work!!!  And an awful awful awful mess!  Many evenings I was too exhausted to do that kind of physical labor being more than halfway through a pregnancy and watching three kids, including two 2 year olds, every day.  But I helped as I could and found I was easily capable of cleaning up.  

I was ready to transform this room for my sweet two year old girl and our only child who was about to become a big sister.  It seems as if it’s been ages since we had an “only child” but I never intended to have it stay that way for long.  By the end of March we were sanding and refinishing the wood floor and picking out pretty pink paint, wallpaper and border print.  My husband, not yet confident in his home repair skills, put up cork board at my suggestion over the hole in the wall for a bulletin board.  The first of April found us putting the final touches on the room, stitching up a set of curtains and the delivery truck arriving with a set of bunk beds that could be stacked or taken apart as needed; perfect for space saving and for tucking in another little boy or little girl eventually.  Haley was just two years old when we moved her out of the crib and into her big bed in her new pink room about two months before the arrival of our second little baby.

Haley was so cute and little back then!  And the pink room with white trim was beautiful.

Haley got my dresser which my mom had painted yellow for me when I was a baby.  Before that it had been hers.  I painted the dresser the same pink as the bedroom was itself and added roses to its sides and top to sort of match the theme of the room.  A blue area rug was purchased for the room as well.  There were bits of blue in the paper and border to match the rug and the rug had roses to tie together with the rest of the room. 
Now let’s fast forward 13 years to this year, 2012, no longer in our 20’s but our 40’s, five failed attempts to sell the house and five kids living in the same (once huge) tiny house.  That beautiful pink room, now housing three girls of various ages from 15 down to 5 has been through a whole lot including little brothers, moisture issues and exterminators over the years. 

Haley (15), Lindsay (13) and Kaitlyn (5) have all been sharing the pink room for the past several years.  That room has had to adapt several times to accommodate three girls and the room needed a change besides repair.  So in mid-July Haley and Lindsay were scheduled to go to camp for 4 1/2 days and we scheduled ourselves to empty the room out for that same week.  You cannot take one room of only five in the whole house out of commission and not feel it with seven people living in the house.  This way there would be only five people to consider and Kaitlyn was the only one displaced from her bedroom to bunk with the boys.  Haley and Lindsay packed up their belongings and left wondering how the room would turn out and with one request from Haley that the dresser not be changed.  She was less than thrilled that we were changing her beloved bedroom.

We put the crib away in the attic and let the kids bunk down on the floor in the boys bedroom.  It gets a little crowded in there with three kids living in it and I was glad that the big girls weren’t living in our living room for the week.

Some 2012 “before” pictures; left shows a destroyed window shade still trying to provide a little privacy, and moldy water damaged molding, center shows ripped paper and missing border print due to a couple of young children over the past few years who also decided to color on the gluey part during quiet time and right picture shows old cork board now harboring mold spores.  The one improvement here is replacement windows put in around 2006.  The old ones were very drafty and difficult to clean and when the panes began falling out too we knew it was time to make the improvement we’d been talking about.

More missing border and a close up of the dormer.  That is not dirt!

Window sill is very weathered with sun and damp.  Time to start scraping; two days this time instead of two months.  And yes, the wall behind the cork board finally got repaired properly!  Hooray for increased confidence and learning home improvement skills.  And the window sills all got sanded and stained.

Even with girls out of the room and stuff cleared out there were still three beds to contend with in a not so large space.  So we switched the trundle to the boys room and tore down Tristan’s bed to become Kaitlyn’s and stored that third bed in pieces on the bunk bed all wrapped in plastic.  The only other piece of furniture was the pink dresser.  Tristan got bumped up to “oldest child” status with many child watching tasks while I got out my painters tape and painted edging and trim.  Rick painted walls.  At night we put on more coats of paints.  Having asked our girls how they wanted their room decorated we realized we’d have to put up some kind of weird rainbow with the wide array of colors that pleased each of them.  So we took the reigns from that discussion… This was not a total makeover and we were not parting with the blue area rug and we had window valences plus our budget was slim.  We decided blue on blue with white, same colors as the boys room and leftover paint to use too.  Very budget friendly.  The white would help keep the room bright and clean looking as well.

The trim is looking nice… the floor ended up looking like a drop cloth… mostly dried flecks that had plastered themselves down in the humidity.

Lots of paint cans… Lots of hardware… have I mentioned how much I love my glass door knobs? 

And my lovely childhood dresser having belonged to my Mom that Haley and Lindsay now share has achieved antique status now… it’s manufacture date is stamped on the back of it and I believe 50 years entitles a piece of furniture to that title.

On my hands and knees the floor got a thorough scrubbing twice over.  I like Murphy’s Oil Soap for my wood floors.  Not only does it smell good but after conducting some of our own experiments three years ago we discovered that it does an amazing job killing pests… the kind you don’t want in your bedroom!  The cookie cutter shapes to this room make it a time consuming decorating job.  The sloped walls, ceiling and dormer are all white.  The former papered walls are now pale blue with dark blue flowers printed at random on those walls.  The flowers took me about an hour to do on both walls in part because I had to experiment and ended up wiping and repainting part of the wall.  I did this task in the middle of the night once the walls were dry enough for me to have fun with them.  Walls are a canvas to me and I let the feel of the room speak to me on how they should be treated.  Therefore I rarely can plan out with much exactness what I will do or how it will turn out.  I like this new look a lot.

Since this room serves three children with a wide age range I tried to give each child their own area within shared tight quarters.  Each girl got a little shelf conveniently located to her bed and a fun name plaque that I painted with the younger children and put together while Rick was up ripping paper off the wall.  Lindsay’s is right over the head of her bed.  Now she doesn’t have to climb out of bed for every single little thing.  And her horse hooks from Christmas finally found a home to hang her robe from as well as her riding helmet or cap.

I really like the shape of the letters for Haley’s name.  I had fun painting these.

The blue on the plaque is the same light blue as the light blue wall.

Unfortunately we were still cleaning up the room as the older girls returned from camp on Saturday.  We still had cleaning to do and beds to set up but bit by bit we put the room back together for a big surprise for them.  Meanwhile I’m sure they felt exhausted and homeless.  I assured them it would be worth the wait. 

I tried to take pictures of the room from all angles.  Even though it is different I love this room once again and how it turned out.  Look!  No hole in the wall!

Haley said she did not want to see her room until the bookcase was back in it.  She loves books and we have a lot of them.  The girls all share one bookcase, each girl getting two shelves and generally they are stuffed.  One problem; the bookshelf which isn’t anything fancy, had some damage on its back and needed a new back or needed replacement.  Since we are trying to keep costs down I told Rick to look around and see what we had on hand.  He is getting braver and I’m so proud of him.  He found, down in the basement, a large piece of tile backing that was left over from when someone put some of this in our kitchen who knows how long ago.  So he cleaned it, cut it, nailed it and we brought up a bookcase that was good as new and worth a few minutes of waiting.  FREE repair!  Hooray!  It looks really great.  And Haley kept her pink dresser, her only request.  I cleaned it up a little for them and moved it to a new spot in the room.

The girls were thrilled to be introduced to their new room and began moving in over the past week.  The blue area rug perfectly pulls the blue walls together with the pink rosey dresser and the flowered valences in the windows contain blue and pink flowers with green stems on a white background which again pulls things together.  These valences are left over from my early college days in the late 1980’s.  Pulled from their box in the attic they are given new life.  A few stitches and they look fantastic in there.  They’ve held up very well.

With the crib gone out of the boys room they had room for a dresser once again.  Tristan is THRILLED he doesn’t have to invade the girls room just to get his own clothes!  The girls wondered why they were the recipients of a changing table in their room.  I took the pad off it, threw a flat pink baby blanket that was special to Kaitlyn over it’s top and stowed all of Kaitlyn’s clothes in a variety of pretty functional baskets and it is now Kaitlyn’s dresser!  She likes having her own dresser top and the ease with which she can get out and put away her clothes with the baskets.  This hides behind the open door of the bedroom next to a large basket of stuffed animals… mostly horses!

The girls love the crisp clean look of the room that they share but the real test… Do the cats approve?  And three of them LOVE it.  The room offers lots of cozy options in space they can all share too!

With some of the money that Rick earned over the summer we decided to replace the 13 year old mattresses on the bunk beds with new more comfortable Serta mattresses from Sams.  The old ones were still encased in plastic WITH their bunky boards and were nearly impossible to make neatly because of that.  We left them zippered as we carried them out of the house and stored them for the week in the garage.  We called Rumpke, our trash collector, and let them know hazmat could stop by to pick them up.  Nobody picked them out of our trash either… SMART!  Usually we don’t bother calling Rumpke because our trash always disappears overnight.

Sandy, Scruffles and Spooky approve of their surroundings for a comfortable night’s sleep…

cuddling with some of their favorite people.
And 4 days for redecorating sounds soooo much better than three months this time around!