City Room

When we first moved into our home I decided that this room was one of the worst.  The blue and red is atrocious, there were holes chewed in the wall and door by a large dog, and the carpet smelled like a dog as well.  Unfortunately, we were financially unable to deal with the carpet after putting everything into closing costs, but after some vacuuming and carpet deodorizer the smell seems to have left (yay!).  Eventually I'll get some new carpet, but it'll do for now.

At any rate, This room was high on my priority list, and thus my second project.  First, wall repairs were done.  Spackle does wonders, I even used it to patch the door!  After using Kilz on the entire room (including that lowered bit of the ceiling... seriously who paints the ceiling like that?), I was ready to start on the walls.  At this point I had acquired many different partially full gallons of interior latex acrylic paint in various colors from various sources... Some were the remaining colors from the previous owners, some were gathered from curbside and craigslist, and some were from a local reuse center.  Lots of paint,  but not enough of one color for an entire room... I knew what I wanted (I had a pinterest board full of ideas after all), and I have a good eye for color mixing, so I got out my trusty paint mixing drill attachment and started mixing what I had together.

I knew I wanted a light brown for most of the walls, so I mixed that first (you can make brown out of almost anything).  I had also found a really cute room on Pinterest that had a 3 tone striped wall in turquoise, orange, and green.  No problem there... I added some white to the leftover turquoise from my daughter's room and played a bit with some of the previous owner's leftover gallons of paint for the orange and green.  Believe it or not, those colors are also significantly lightened.  The master bedroom is currently painted entirely dark orange... even the trim (yuck).

This room has a neat little angled wall, so I decided to incorporate that into my next idea.  Who says you can only have one accent wall in a room?!  My son really likes transportation and I wanted to do a mural in his room, so a city seemed to be the way to go. First, I got out my trusty Home Depot yard stick and drew a simple outline in pencil.. A city skyline is mostly straight lines, so with a little bit of measuring, that wasn't so difficult.  I also drew some fun flying vehicles in the sky.  To keep the color scheme of the room from going totally nuts I stuck with a darker brown for the building silhouettes.  This brown was an unaltered left over color from the previous owners.  The trim in the hall bathroom is currently that color... and the walls are dark green.... yep.

So, after painting the buildings dark brown I added details in white.  I didn't want an overly colorful mural with all of the other colors going on in the room.  Cute right?  But, not done yet... this mural needs to glow in the dark!

Insert Martha Stewart's glow in the dark paint.  It's a little pricey for my cheapskate tendencies, but I waited for my 40% off a single item coupon from Joanne's and splurged a bit... plus I have a ton left over for more projects.... I also have a white tank top that looks perfectly clean in the light, but has glowing smudges on it in the dark (a fact which I continually forget when getting dressed, lol).  It took a few coats on the windows and moon, but it didn't take too long to do, and you can't hardly tell that the glow-in-the-dark paint is there during the daytime.  

After finishing the mural, I decided that it needed something else... a road shelf?  sure!  My son loves matchbox cars, so this gives him a fun place to play and interact with his city mural.  Like the shelves in my daughter's room, these are leftover from a cheap bookcase that didn't survive the move.  Because of the location of this shelf (next to the door), I knew that sharp corners would be an issue.  So I traced a curve from a plate and then cut on the line with a jigsaw.  After scuffing the surface up with some sandpaper I painted all sides of the shelf the same color as the mural.  Then I simply painted the road on them.  Surprisingly, several months later, the shelf is still attached to the wall.  I was seriously expecting my son to break it (lol, he is VERY rough on toys and furniture).

The bed in his room is an Ikea bunk bed.  The low profile of his bed works well with the low ceiling.  He has had it for a while so when we moved it was covered in stickers and marker, but it cleaned up pretty nice.  Honestly, I was surprised.  I was expecting to have to paint it.  But after using my favorite Dollar Tree cleaner, Totally Awesome, on it, it looked great (seriously, this stuff will clean anything.  I used it in my art room to get virtually every kind of art supply off of the tables... even sharpie).  The dresser was a refinished garage find (see entry in the furniture section).  All in all, I am much happier with the finished look of this room than I am with my daughter's room.

Of course, it didn't look all nice and polished like that for long... sigh...

Our First Home - the beginning

In the beginning of February 2013, my family of 5 (the youngest just a few days old) closed on our first home.  It was built in the late 70s, needed some work, and a gang of sloppy painting monkeys had been hired to paint half of the rooms in an array of awful dark colors. . . If my doctor had seen me moving boxes and furniture about the house by myself just days after giving birth I'm certain she would have tied me to a chair (or worse).  But who can sit still when you have just moved into the first place that is actually yours?  (I didn't injure myself, but I certainly do not recommend engaging in this sort of physical labor so soon post partum.)  I wanted to get our belongings sorted so that I could begin the house make-over that I had been planning (via Pinterest) for months prior to closing (yes, it took 6 months to close.  Short-sales are evil.).  I began in my daughter's room.  It was one of the worst.

In my haste to begin, I forgot to take a "before" picture of the room, so I grabbed this one from the online listing for the house.  What you can't see here is that there is purple slopped on the ceiling, the white line is just where a piece of masking tape had been placed during painting, and that when all of these posters were pulled down some of the paint went with them. . . also, the walls were filthy and there was writing all over the inside of the door.  Suffice it to say, it needed work.  First, the peeling paint needed to be dealt with.  We decided that we would have to go ahead and peel off the bits that were already peeling.  So with a putty knife I scraped off everything that was loose.  My husband then cleaned the walls with TSP and I went to work patching with spackle.  Since the walls were dark, in bad shape, and glossy we put a coat of kilz over everything.  A word of advice... if you plan on living in the house while doing this, buy the low-odor variety... we didn't, and I learned my lesson.


I had been loving the look of rooms with teal walls, pink furniture, and black and white details on Pinterest.  So, I went that route.  I decided to also try out the Chevron pattern that I continued to see on decorating sites.  It was so edgy!  If you check out my Pinterest boards you may recognize a few other projects in the room.

Most of the things in this room were done seriously "on-the-cheap."  The black curtains were found in the clearance section for dirt cheap and the valance is basically a long tutu from cheap tulle.  The bunting is made from scrapbook paper and yarn that had been laying around unused in my craft supply bin for years.  The desk was originally another clearance find, though at this point the top had been damaged and it needed some touch-up work on the front.  Dollar store contact paper to the rescue!  The wall mounted shelves are sporting that dollar store contact paper as well.  The shelves themselves used to belong to one of those $15 small bookshelves from Walmart.  Unfortunately, the bookcase itself didn't survive the move, but being the forward thinking hoarder recycler that I am, I kept them just in case.  The dresser was a refinishing project (see the page about that in the furniture section), and the frames on top were garbage finds that I spray painted with the leftover paint from the dresser.

I love the chevron, but I don't love the whole room yet... I feel like it needs something else, but it's definitely a lot better than before.  I've decided to come back to this room later with a fresh look after working on some other rooms first.