Room for Boy

On the heels of completing our redesign of the kids rooms at church, I was feeling inspired and motivated (and had all sorts of free time), so I launched immediately into redecorating Boy's room.

We set up this room originally to be gender neutral for ages 2-5 (which you can see here). We were feeling lazy then, so we kept the paint color from the fresh coat it got when we bought the house in 2009. But neither of us ever loved that color; it was time to brighten it up.

We picked Behr's Appletini, after 8 paint chips, 3 sample cans,  and 2 mind-changes (and a whole lot of lobbying on my end). Matt wanted Rave Green, and while I vetoed, we actually ended up pretty close. While we were up to our elbows in drop cloths and fumes, we opted to remove the baseboard heater that has never worked, so we can get the room ready for real baseboard trim, which we've never had. (It's a fixer-upper. We've just learned to deal with it.)

The quilt was a bit part of the change. The original quilt had been made by my mom (and is still on the bed, under this new quilt), and is terribly cute, but too young for Boy. So, I picked the palette and drew inspiration from a quilt on Pinterest (you'll be seeing a lot of Pinterest in this post!). It's the best quilt I've ever created, and I'm very happy with it. The back has his name stretched across it - one 9" block for each letter, inspired by this. He thinks it's pretty special.

A few elements stayed from the previous room. The furniture, the little wooden shelves, blind and curtains, and I didn't touch the closet. And also, this cute pennant string because I'm oh-so-in-love with pennants and I couldn't bear to get rid of it.

Most of the woodland creature theme got packed up or repurposed throughout the house - because I am still in love with woodland creatures.

Of course the whole motivation was to give Boy a room that felt like his. We're not sure he's ever had his own room before, let alone one fresh and fun, so it seemed worth it. I needed to add a handful of funky details.

This sunshine is one of my new favorite techniques: foamcore board, cut to shape and wrapped with fabric. We found this technique via Pinterest, and used it in one of the rooms at church, and I was itching to do it again. This is the room that made me feel the need to include a sunshine!

I didn't want to go too heavily themed, just a few accents that reflected Boy's personality and favorites. This boy is all sunshine, so this seemed appropriate. (And he was pretty impressed with it.)

The lego clock was another adapted Pinterest idea, and I'm on the fence about how it turned out. But again, Boy loves it, so who cares!

 

These clouds are corkboard, cut to shape and painted, and the thumbtacks will give Boy a place to hang up the fun little pictures and cards he receives. The idea came from an Urban Outfitters product that I love but am entirely too cheap to pay for.

Yet another Pinterest idea, these are papier mache boxes, minus their lids, painted on the inside only, and adhered to the wall with 3M "velcro" strips. I love the 3M wall-hanging products - so great. I should probably buy stock...

Again, inspired by Pinterest. An inexpensive shadowbox frame, spraypainted within an inch of it's life, containing a collection of hotwheels I picked up between Value Village and Fred Meyer, mounted on brown paper.

Boy could not conceive of cars that were merely decorative, behind glass, inaccessible, and could not be removed from the surface to which they were glued. Don't read too much into that - it'll break your heart.

This was one of my main ideas for the room. It started as a grand scheme - a magnetic road that goes all the way around the room (thanks to this idea on Pinterest), and then I got realistic. I used a crazy precise method of taping and sealing the tape before painting, so it was rather intense, and that was just on the 6 foot stretch of wall I did do, so I'm glad I talked myself out of the crazy. This is 4 coats of magnetic paint (and the white was painted first, then taped off with little precisely-cut slivers of white tape), topped with one coat of black latex paint. The only way we could get the cars to stick was using two neodymium (rare earth) magnets on each car. Lots of trial and error here.

We also added a few crates, stacked, for books, and I made a very brightly colored cover for his beanbag chair. The lighting is too awkward for wider shots, so this is all you get. Thanks for looking!