Adventures in Home Decorating, Part 2

I’m continuing my story from yesterday’s post about our family’s journey into redecorating the bedrooms.  Keep reading if you want to know whether or not my son has skulls on his walls and whether or not my daughter stuck with purple.

We started our project with the upstairs room, as it’s the largest but had the fewest pieces of furniture to move.  It only took a couple of days to paint, no wallpaper to scrape.  The thing that was most frustrating about the painting was all the crazy angles.  Because it’s up by the roof, there were lots of tight spaces and awkward spots where the walls and ceiling meet.  I made the mistake of painting in a tight spot in such a way that I backed into the freshly primed wall, thus priming the back of my pants.  I will be eternally grateful to my sister-in-law for putting up with me and helping me out with all the painting.

Moving the furniture upstairs was an ordeal.  We had to move a queen-size bed up the narrow, curved stairs.  Even with three of us, we barely made it, only to realize that the box spring wasn’t going to go up at all.  The bad news is that we had to get rid of the box spring, both because it wouldn’t fit and because we discovered that it was broken.  The good news is, we got a fantastic new bed frame that doesn’t need the separate spring and folds up.  We also gained several inches of space under the bed.  My husband ordered it on a Sunday night, it arrived Tuesday morning.

With that out of the way, it was time to get to the kids rooms. It only took a week to finish both rooms.  With a little help from some friends, who kindly loaned me their children to babysit, I had plenty of time to scrape wall border, wash walls, prime, and paint.

I’m sure you’ve been wondering, to the point of losing sleep, whether or not my son got his skulls.  When he first proposed it, we nixed the black.  It’s too hard to paint over.  We told him he could have midnight blue, and still do the skulls.  In the end, though, he decided on Smurf blue and an ocean theme.  Not that I have anything against skulls, but I have to admit, I was relieved.

Sarah changed her mind as well.  When confronted with all those lovely colors, she settled on the most vivid green she could find.  I was nervous at first, but the color actually looks wonderful on her walls.  She said she wanted it to look like a meadow.  I had given her my old bedspreads, the ones my mother made for me.  One is golden and furry, like a lion; the other has appliqued baby dragons.  She wanted the walls to be like grass for her jungle and fantasy animals.  Sadly, the paint peeled a bit in Sarah’s room because the previous owner had used an oil-based paint.  But we made do, touched up the walls a bit, and were good to go.

I’m relieved this project is over.  It’s nice to have the kids all moved in.  I would say that I’ll never do this again, but I don’t want to jinx myself.  After all, we still have the kitchen and the basement to do.