Room Reveal

Earlier this fall I mentioned to Jake that we could redecorate his room if he wanted.  Initially he wasn't so gung-ho about it.  He said he liked his room.  A week later he asked what I'd had in mind.  I offered up newly painted walls, a new bedspread, and maybe some accessories.  A week after that he wondered what colors I had been thinking - I told him it was up to him.

A week later he told me gray and orange.

After, that we were off and running in the idea department.  He really liked the pictures he already had hanging up.  Which was good, because so did I.  That and they have such great memories for me.  He was around 4 or 5 years old when we first set up his room and we had been at Target and he pointed these pictures out to me and said he really liked the race cars.  He asked me about them all the time.  However, they were way beyond the budget we had set.  I told him we could keep an eye on them to see if they ever went on sale and maybe we could buy one.  He kept that in his head and because it was summer, he and I were soon walking to and from Target every single day.  After a little over a week our persistence paid off.  His pictures were on sale....for 75% off!  We were able to get all three for around $25.  It just makes me smile to think of how excited he was to be able to get all three and how every day he asked if we should walk to Target to check on his pictures.

Anyway...here's what his room looked like pre-makeover:

And rest assured - this was abnormal.  Most days things were scattered all over his floor, but we'd made him shovel things out that day.  

I brought home some paint samples and he and I sat in his room looking at different walls, with different lights on and off and he finally chose the paint color he wanted.  It took me about a week to get the painting done, including the orange stripes.  When I showed him my original striped idea, he changed it up, then rechanged it, then changed it again, only to decide that the original idea was the best one.  (Life was so much easier when our kids didn't have an opinion!)

Things came to a standstill.  We bought something to hold his Legos.  Then it sat for awhile before I finally put it together and sorted all his Legos by color.  Then the room sat some more.  

Last week without telling him I enlisted the help of my parents.  They showed up about 10 minutes after he left for school and we ambushed his room.

Ta - da!!!

(All the paraphernalia under his bed will be going.  Mike and he plan to build a wall of Nerf guns in his closet.  Hopefully there will be room left for his clothes.  I'm not joking - he has that many Nerf guns.)

The gray on the walls ended up being far lighter than we had envisioned, but he still liked it.  On Friday my parents and I talked a little on his furniture placement and tried to come up with a way to give him separate spaces for his different activities: a reading/Lego area, a school work area, and his drum area.  I didn't think it was going to be possible until we just moved the bed to try things out and it worked perfectly.

I spent a few days last week working on these signs.  I had printed up some mock ideas for Jake to look at to see what my plans were to incorporate the cars he LOVES into his room design without getting all theme-y.  I had tried painting them by hand and that was a bust.  I ended up printing out my graphic design at OfficeMax and using Modge Podge to adhere them to some canvases.  Neither of us was too impressed with them once I finished them, but my mom suggested we put them on the wall anyway and in the end we all decided they worked really well.

A couple weeks back the kids, my mom and I ventured to Joann's where we found the perfect orange and gray fabrics to make a bench cushion.  Enter mom: she did all the work.  On Friday we realized we had enough orange fabric to make a pillow cover for a pillow form I already had laying around and she whipped one of those up too.  The Lego storage is working out AWESOME and he loves having everything sorted by color and it's actually staying that way!

These shelves were a bit of a fluke, but worked out perfectly.  We were looking for some plain ones at Target and I spotted these right away - because they were the only ones on sale!  This gave us a chance to nicely display his treasures from Grandma Murphy's house but keep them off the furniture tops where things were being piled on top of them.  My dad spent a good deal of time trying to get these hung just right - they were super annoying to hang.  In the end my mom was chomping at the bit to be able to decorate them so I offered up trying to hang them with 3M Velcro strips.  I'm happy to report they haven't fallen off the wall!

While my dad worked on the shelves my mom and I cleaned up Maddie's room and hung up her bulletin board (which Jake also received though I didn't picture it) as well as a new full length mirror for the back of her door she's wanted forever.  Two rooms for the price of one!

Thanks to my helpers!  I thought we'd bust this out in only a couple hours.  They were there for about five!  There's no way I would have been able to complete this all on my own in one day and surprise Jake like we did.  We kept saying it was like we were one of those HGTV shows...kind of fun and exciting to surprise someone with a makeover!