Preston's New Room

Our house has four bedrooms, so when we first moved in and didn't have any kids yet (I was pregnant with Preston) so we got this desk for $10 off of craigslist and made this into my craft room.  One of the things we liked about our house was the fact that we wouldn't have to paint a lot because we already liked the colors and the previous owners were nice enough to leave all of the extra paint in the garage for us.  One of the first things I did was go around and patch all the holes in the walls and paint over them with the wall color.  Unfortunately I did this before I checked to make sure we had all of the paints.  We ended up not having any of the green from this room, and it had a LOT of holes that I had patched.  We didn't want to repaint the entire room right away so I took a flower stamp that I have and used the pink paint they had left in the garage and put flowers on the wall to cover up the mess I had made.  Gabe wasn't a big fan of the flowers but was okay with them because it was my room. :)

A few months later we were expecting Preston to come soon so we wanted to get beds for our parents to sleep in when they came to visit.  We ended up buying bunk beds on craigslist, planning for the future, and got mattresses at a mattress warehouse.  At this point we still had flowers and mismatching bedspreads.  This was back in June 2007.

That summer we found these pillows at a garage sale from a neighbor down the street.  I thought they were cute so we decided to use them as the theme to the room which one day would be Preston's once he moved out of the nursery... once again I was thinking ahead.

Soon after that we found bedspreads on clearance that had brown, tan, cream, and the exact same blue as the pillow so we thought they would go well with our theme.  We decided to keep the green on the walls that was already there (even though it isn't the same as the other) and just paint stripes to cover up the flowers and tie all of the colors together.  I don't know anything about painting so I'm grateful my friend Amy helped me tape for the first stripe and taught me a trick to make really smooth straight lines.  By the time we did this it was April 2008.

Of course Gabe's first goal was to cover up the flowers he hated so much. :)

This was back when I was allowed to paint, and sadly was the only stripe I was able to help with.

The brown stripe all finished.  We were pretty proud of ourselves.

Not too long after we finished painting the brown stripe I helped Gabe put the tape up for the next stripe and it stayed like that for months without us painting anything!  I don't know why I don't have a picture like that.  I think we had someone coming to visit so we moved everything back in the room and just never got back to painting.  The reason we finally did is because we want to move Preston into his room before the baby is born, and since I've been having issues with pre-term contractions I figure the sooner the better.  The only problem was that Gabe would have to do it all by himself this time.  One night he painted the entire blue stripe, and the next day he went up and taped the next line without me asking.  He was determined to get it done too!

Here he is working hard.

He's sealing the line with the base color so that when we painted it would make a nice clean line.

Then he painted the next color on that afternoon once the paint had dried.  Only one more stripe to go!

He's measuring and marking for the last line.  That night Gabe put up the tape and painted the last stripe.  It was the only color that needed two coats, so he put the second coat on the next day and "we" were finally finished!

Here's the finished product!  I can't believe how fast we were able to get it done once we decided to.  Thanks to the help of Gabe of course.  I put the vinyl lettering up though.

The door out of his room.  Notice the animals above the door frame.

I forgot to mention that Gabe built the bunk beds right after he finished painting the last stripe and got them up that day.  It was just my job to make the beds.

I made these picture frames last year as well.  I had wanted to do something like this and my friend Kim is the one that told me the frames were at the dollar store!  We borrowed a stamp set from another friend and worked together on this project.  I ended up painting the frames the tan color though.  They were just white to start with.

Lamps can get to be really expensive but I found this one at target for a good price and the blue was the right color.  The stand was white as well so I painted it the same tan color a long time ago.  We got this alligator as a shower gift before Preston was born so I just used a glue gun to attach it to the stand.

The bedspreads we got both came with bedskirts which you can't really use with this type of bed.  So I destroyed them and made them into curtains instead.  I had wanted buttons on the top part and wasn't able to find big ones like I wanted in the right colors, so I ended up spraypainting bright blue, red, and green ones to get the colors I wanted.

I bought a bunch of animal stuff in the dollar section at target too.  Preston loves giraffes!

We got these stuffed animals at a garage sale last summer.  They look like they've never been touched!  Preston loves the baby elephant!

Well I guess that's it!  I actually just remembered that I had started making more pillows for the beds with all of the different colors a long time ago.   Maybe I'll post about those if I ever get them finished. :)  We're excited to move Preston into his new room hopefully sometime next week after his bedrail comes in the mail.  I have become a master at online shopping lately. ;)