A kid's bedroom remodel

Christmas always poses a bit of a dilemma in our house. How do we honor our family members who want to give our kids gifts without filling our house with junk and spoiling our children? We work extra hard to make sure that "kid things" don't monopolize our house. If possible, we would prefer them not to show their face in the main living rooms. We have set up the house so that the kids play outside, in their room, or in their portion of basement, but we can maintain some uncluttered areas in our living room, dining room, and kitchen.

Last year for Christmas we had the great idea of remodeling the girls' room as a present. We enlisted grandma to help by purchasing new comforters as a gift for Christmas. I looked at the calendar and set aside a day. For my Christmas gift, I received a day of babysitting from my aunt, so I set that up for the same day. When the day arrived, my husband was overwhelmed with a project at work and was not able to concentrate on any other project. We took the day of babysitting and went out on a date (which is more what the "gift" of babysitting was intended for, I'm sure).

A month or two passed and I finally caved in and put the new comforters on the beds without painting, etc. Finally, about June, my mother in law called to say that she is coming for a week to help us decorate the girls' room. Evidently, my father in law was going on a mission trip to help do projects on people's houses. Even though my mother in law wanted to help, she was not able to commit to sleeping on gym floors for a week, so she decided that helping us with our house would be close enough.

The project consisted of:
1 - buying matching purple paint and doing a quick coat to cover up the disaster of a paint job that existed.
2 - removing grapevine wallpaper border.
3 - painting pink accent wall.
4 - painting all trim, doors, and windows white and covering up the purple paint that was all over them from the last paint job.
5 - making the white and pink "dots" out of contact paper. developing a pattern we liked and measuring and sticking them into place.
6 - making invisible bookshelves out of old books from a tutorial on instructables.com.
7 - making circle bookshelves from cardboard concrete forms as found also on instructables.com.
8 - spray painting toybox lid.
9 - hanging new curtains.
10 - sorting toys and give away 60% of them. 


Here is the finished product. You'll have to forgive the video quality as it was just done quickly on my regular camera, so the lighting is a mess, but you'll get the idea. We love it. It is a great room for our girls, but it is technically the "master" bedroom... so it might not be so good for the resale value! Oh well... you can't have everything.