Thursday, June 11, 2015

Henry's Room

It's been a while since I've done a renovation update. 

This past week, Dennis was gone on a seven day trip to the Boundary Waters, so I decided I would need some sort of project to keep me busy. Not to say that there isn't enough to do over here (there is), but I wanted a fun distraction.

My original plan had been to paint the kitchen but as I was putting Henry to bed one night, I told him my plans and he said sadly, "When you paint my room?" He has been asking me to paint his room blue since we moved in, but since other areas of the house needed more attention, I had been putting it off. Henry made a gesture to his walls and said, "Yuck!" I felt the same way.


 
 
The wallpaper was pretty outdated as well as really dirty. You can't see the dirt in this picture of course. It also had some weird brown glop speckled on the walls. Yuck.
 
And here, (picture below) is a hole in the wall. You can see by my hand that's it's not a huge hole but not small either. It's amazing how holes in the walls can make a room feel so junky.
 



I have this thing about wallpapering light switch covers. I don't like it. It seems tacky to me. Not too surprising that this is exactly what the former owners did.

Look how dirty it is!
So the next day we went to Home Depot and bought some blue paint and painting supplies. I painted every day after Henry's nap. I didn't want to paint in the morning when the paint fumes would still be strong, so I had only an hour every day to paint because I had to make dinner.

I've always told Dennis that I don't like to paint around the kids, and it's still true. They're too distracting and bad things can happen between paint and kids. (One day I will tell you how Henry used a half-empty paint can as a drum, turned upside down with the lid off.)   But, desperate times calls for desperate measures, and I really needed a project to help me get through the week. My goal was to have the room totally done (hole in the wall excluded) by the time Dennis got home.

Here's a picture of his homecoming by the way--we missed him!

It's bedtime, which is why everyone's in their pjs. The black clouds made the sun reflection much brighter.

 
 

When Dennis finally got in the door, we surprised him with this:




Turned from a depressing and dirty room into a little boys room! Henry loves it!

I got lucky with the blue paint. Normally, I pick a color that looks good on the swatch card but looks terrible on the wall. This time, I had five kids distracting me, so I just picked anything that looked blue and hoped for the best. I loved it!

The more I thought about it, the more I thought the room needed personality rather than just blue walls. We are lacking on furniture for Henry (as you can tell from the picture), and we don't even have a real dresser for him yet (we use storage drawers that you can get at Target for $10), so I wanted something to distract the eyes from the bareness of the room. Can't go wrong with chalkboard paint, and it's real cheap too! The kids love it, every day they draw on the wall.

Last, I bought some "city" decals off of Amazon. I think this is what Henry loves most about his room. He loves anything with wheels; cars, trucks, trains, whatever. And it's a bonus that it also came with a boat and planes. It definitely gives that "little boy" look to the room.

Dennis liked it too. I think he was a little relieved. He was a little worried when I said a "surprise" was waiting for him at home.

Got so much more to do with this house. But "do Henry's room" can now be crossed off the list.

DO HENRY'S ROOM.   

Check.

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