Things are changing in all sorts of ways for our little family. When I am able, I will blog more about our journey and some of the new roads we’re traveling. For now, I’ll start with our recent home project.
Two years ago, we spent several weeks redecorating our living room and dining room. (Some of you who know us in real life may remember that.) It took three days to strip the wallpaper off in the dining room and another day to remove it from our entryway. The house was torn up all summer. Both kids were in camp at the time, and my husband was teaching summer school. I would drop the kids off in the morning, then come home to steam and scrape. In the end, we had two beautiful new rooms. I decided that it had been worth it, but I was never going to do that much redecorating in one go again.
Ha, ha.
This summer, we decided to let the kids have their own rooms. Up until now, we’ve only ever used two of our three bedrooms. Our house is a Cape style, so we have one bedroom upstairs (never used) and two downstairs. Now, we could have moved everyone around without painting. All we would have had to do is clean thoroughly and move the furniture.
Um.
Part of the problem is that the upstairs room had been painted a hideous shade of pink. I don’t care for pink anyway, but this hue was particularly nauseating. Which is ironic, as it was the exact shade of Pepto-Bismol. Apparently, this was the previous owner’s favorite color, because when we moved in, nearly the whole house was drenched in it. My husband and I declared that if we were going to move into the upstairs room, that color had to go.
Which meant, of course, that the kids wanted to paint their rooms, too.
Nothing wrong with that. After all, Jack’s room was designed with a much younger child in mind. When we were expecting him, I didn’t want to decorate the nursery in standard pastels. I wanted bright, vivid colors. We chose VeggieTales as the theme and I bought some wall border. I took it to Home Depot and they matched the accent color of the wall border. For the last nine-plus years, the walls have been an eye-popping shade of yellow.
Meanwhile, the walls in Sarah’s room-to-be were cranberry red. That was fine when it was our room, as that’s the color of our comforter. But it wasn’t so nice for a little girl, especially one with a love for bright colors. So we allowed the kids to pick their own colors and themes. A fairly quick trip to Home Depot and we had everything we needed to turn their rooms into their own private sanctuaries.
When we first asked them, Jack said he wanted to paint his walls black and decorate with skulls.
Yeah.
At least we have one relatively normal child. Sarah wanted purple walls.
Stick with me, tomorrow I will finish the Saga of the New Rooms. You’ll have to wait until then to find out whether the skulls made an appearance. (Some of you already know; don’t spoil it!)
