FO: My Son's Room

My son's room is done!

Before:

My older son is ten years old. Although this was a great room for him even before the makeover (although a bit messy), there were a couple of problems with it. First, the walls had not been painted since we moved in eight years ago. Can you see the puffy clouds on the baby blue walls and ceiling and the toddler transportation-themed border? It was really cool when he was three. Second, the dresser is way too small. It never occurred to me that kids' clothing gets bigger as they do and requires more space to store--until recently, when I could no longer fit even his relatively modest wardrobe back into the drawers on laundry day. So the plan was new paint and a new dresser, with a bit of cleaning and reorganizing.

The hardest part was clearing out the room so that I could paint. Unless you've done it, you cannot imagine how much stuff accumulates in a kid's room over the course of eight years.

By the time I got to this point, I had completely filled the guest room and the upstairs hallway, as well as several trash bags. I also discovered some unpleasant truths about children.

They have dirty hands:

And they wipe...things...on the walls:

I have my suspicions about what these rock hard, greenish raisins stuck to the walls actually are, but when you are the one scraping them off, it's best not to think too much about it.

I also learned something about "strippable" wallpaper. "Strippable" does not mean you can strip it off the walls. It means that you can strip the walls off with it:

Not to worry, though. A can of spray-on texture and a coat of primer and no one will ever know the difference.

Two days later, here is the final product:

In the above picture, you can just see the corner of the IKEA dresser that took me all afternoon to assemble. Here's a slightly better shot. It's almost impossible to get a picture of anything located under this window:

It is one of those flat-packed things that comes in a shoe box, weighs a thousand pounds, and, with the aid of 10,000 fasteners of various sorts, assembles to create a life-sized replica of the Titanic. It is a lot bigger than the old dresser and easily holds all my son's clothes without the need for complex origami folds.

You may have noticed that the ceiling does not yet have its planned constellations. We are still in negotiations about those. On the whole, though, I'm pleased with this makeover. No major changes, but a nice update for little money in a short time. And just because I'm so pleased with how well it all coordinates, here is another shot of the swatch that inspired the makeover:

Is there any question as to what I'll be casting on next?