When my
roomie Niki and I were moving into our house in Texas, we pooled our money to buy the essential larger pieces of furniture. However, after we bought the couch (at the ever sketchy but always fun Willie's Warehouse), the dining room set (on the side of road between our town and another town), and the coffee table and side tables (at
Ikea before we left our training in Houston), we had almost no money and about a month before we'd receive our first paycheck. So we bought some cheap Kmart furniture that could be assembled a variety of different ways and consisted of black particle board and silver plastic poles that screwed together in the holes in the black pieces. Surprisingly, these cheap pieces have lasted well through the years as TV stands (in several different configurations), bedside tables, side tables, bookcases, and storage shelves. However, due to some rearranging to make way for new furniture that my grandmother gave us and to turn the office into office/nursery, I had these black boards and silver poles with, for the first time since Niki and I bought them, no purpose...
And then I remembered that I had been trying to figure out what I wanted to do/buy/make (okay, have Lee make, since he's the carpenter in this house!) to organize Jocelyn's toys, especially since the changing table - which has a couple shelves for toys - would be moving out of her room to the office/nursery ... and now the story turns from words to pictures and captions ...
The closest thing to a before shot that I have - sorry! On the right side of the screen, you can see the TV stand. (And, no, we did not have two identical couches. Which leads to the next obvious question, to which I answer, "yes, that is a doorway that previous owners of my first Texas house closed off on one side and then thought, '
hmm, what should we do with the other side? oh, I've got it! let's leave it framed like a doorway and just put a mirror where the door would be so that you always feel like you're looking into an alternate reality that just through the doorway ...'" I miss that house and its oddities!)
The two pictures from Jocelyn's big girl bedding that inspired the new design ...
Since the walls of Jocelyn's room are already purple like the wings on the first fairy and even though I would have
preferred to go with the teal rather than pink for the shelves since the bedding is already
very pink, I went with Jocelyn's favorite color - yep, pink! - with yellow gingham accents. I decided to try my hand at spray painting for the first time ever, and I must say that I'm satisfied with the results ...
First, a progress shot (yes, we need to rake) ...
And,
drumroll please, the results ...
Her room isn't completely revamped from nursery to big girl room yet, but it's closer! (And, yes, since our big girl likes to climb, the shelves are securely fastened to the walls so they'll be safe if - okay, when - she attempts to summit them.) I'll be posting more pics once I:
- put the second window valance up.
- finish and hang the small paintings of shapes that I'm working on for above each headboard (which have the same pink background and will be hung with the same yellow ribbon to tie it all together).
- hang the mirror that matches her beds.
- move the two large pictures/paintings from their old homes when the room was a nursery to their new spots now (including the flower picture that you can see in one of the pictures above).
- touch-up the paint on the walls, including painting over the verses (Genesis 6:22 in both English and Spanish) and small mural that I had on the wall around the wooden Noah's ark that Lee's dad made (which matches the nursery decor and thus has been moved to the office/nursery).
- take down the blanket hanging on the wall that is part of the crib bedding set ... once again, to move into the office/nursery.
Oh, and this project (plus being in Texas until a week and a half ago) is why none of our Christmas trees are up yet and why our house is only partially decorated for the holidays! :) But, keeping with the Saunders family tradition, we always keep our decorations up until Epiphany (January 6
th), so putting up the decorations this weekend still gives us three and a half weeks to enjoy them! (Probably longer than that since, also keeping in Saunders family tradition, following the rule that you can't take any decorations down until January 6
th usually means that the decorations stay up long enough that you're considering just hanging hearts on the tree to celebrate Valentine's Day instead of taking it down since it's been up so long ...)
