Bedroom Makeover

You are probably wondering, what does a bedroom makeover have to do with  a food blog?!  Well, the bedroom makeover was for our oldest son (J), who celebrated his 5th birthday this month.  The bedroom makeover took me away from creating in the kitchen for a few days as I was working on the project - and I thought my friends in my blog world would enjoy seeing a different part of who I am.  The new room was part of his birthday present from us, bye-bye to the little boy room with trains and hello to a big boy room.  I had found a picture on Pinterest that I loved (the squares - second picture on the link) and wanted to incorporate the squares into the room makeover.  I had all sorts of ideas in mind, I had hoped to incorporate orange into the bedding as J's favourite colour is orange, but I had NO LUCK finding something that I liked.  So after much searching, I decided to go with shades or blue and white, as I finally found a bedding set that would work for the makeover.  I was all ready to start picking paint when J informed us that he wanted fire trucks in his new bedroom (J has wanted to be a fireman for most of his 5 years).  Red fire trucks with the blue & white bedding that I had picked out did not work well together...so my original plan went out the window! 

Back to shopping here there and everywhere to see what I could find.  Finally I came up with a new duvet cover that I felt would do the trick.  It had the red for fire trucks, plus new colours to work with.  A girlfriend and I spent an evening "accessory" shopping for the room, I picked out the paint colours, and my revised plan/vision with squares on the walls was back in action.

We started slowly packing up his room for a few days prior to the big makeover.  Thankfully my parents had J over for a sleepover so that we only had the baby to care for on the weekend we were doing the work, and this enabled us to surprise J with his new room.

Here is the BEFORE:

And here is the AFTER:

And here is what we did!

Furniture: Some of the furniture is still the same - no need to replace perfectly good furniture!  The bed and nightstand are still the same.  We added a "new" chest of drawers, which was mine out of our closet. I repainted it red to match the bedroom.  The chest of drawers that J had in his room went into his brother's room (matches the furniture in there).  We found a used desk for sale on a local buy and sell the week of the big re-do, and it matches perfectly.  It cost us a whopping $12!  Cool!  There is a bookcase, however, it is not paintable so my handy, woodworking Grandfather is building J a new one that we can paint red to match the rest of the room.  Lucky boy!

Closet: My husband added a second row of shelving in the closet so that we had more hanging space.  Our son loved it - not only did he get new hangers to hang his clothes on, he spent forever organizing and re-organizing the hangers into different colour patterns.  It was (and still is) too cute!

Wall Colours: I have a hard time painting a room just one colour.  Most of the rooms in our house (that aren't still "Builder's Beige") have been repainted with at least two colours.  I can't help it, it's just who I am!  And with the squares being incorporated into the design, there had to be a few colours in there.  So the walls are painted with four colours.  Yes, four.  Actually five.  But the fifth colour matches the existing trim, so I'm not really counting it (white).  I had three colours picked out to match the new bedding and accessories, but (as mentioned) since J's favourite colour is orange, he would have been sad if there wasn't orange in the room - so we added a stripe of orange on a little angled wall next to his desk that is perfect (he can see it from his bed and desk, but the rest of us can't see it when we walk in the room).

Red - General Paint (GP) Sizzle
Dark Grey - (GP) Artesan 
Light Grey - (GP) Spray River
Orange - (GP) Glazed Carrot
White (GP) - used to paint over the blue wall and over the trains to ensure the new colours would go on evenly

Wall Vinyl: Fortunately for us, my husband owns a vinyl business and was able to create the wall vinyl for J's room.  He found a maltese and a few fire trucks to go up on the walls.  Saved me from having to hand-paint them (like I had the trains way back when...before he had the business).  It was great too as he was able to match the vinyl perfectly to the paint and accessories.

Window Coverings: The blinds are the same as before, the curtains are new. Long. Bold. Red. Love them!  The curtain rod is also new.

And this was our son's reaction to his new room...I think it passed inspection ;-)