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ORC: The Big Boy Room – Getting Started {ORC Spring 2016: Week 3}

Welcome back! So in my Before post, I mentioned we had fixed a few of the annoying parts about this room. This was all PIY (pay it yourself) because we discussed and quickly decided to hire some contractors to come in for 4 days and deal with all the issues in ALL the rooms on the second floor as this could have easily taken us noobs months of weekends to complete ourselves.  And while updating molding and/or hanging doors might not sound that difficult, with a deadline like ours, we were not willing to cut our teeth on this. Sometimes it just pays to pay someone else. To recap the fixable issues in this room:

  1. Those radiators have about 10 layers of paint on them, and are constantly falling away from the wall. Hours of fun for a curious toddler.
  2. There are about 3 different types of molding in this room entire house. Some clamshell, some colonial, some walls have shoe molding, some don’t. This inconsistency is quite consistent throughout our house, by the way. Drives. Me. Insane.
  3. And that doorway is in the left corner of the room (basically where the photo is taken from), however, the door opens TO THE RIGHT. Whyyyyyyyy.
  4. The ceiling boob light is about 11 inches to the right of the center of the ceiling. I repeat. Whyyyyyyyyy.
Prime example of the inconsistency in molding hanging out in the middle of our hallway.  Some shoe, some not, some non-molding patchwork, as you do apparently.

The contractors removed all the molding around the floor, windows and doors and installed simple colonial with shoe molding.  We have consistency! (PS we had already done this in most rooms on the first floor with initial construction when we bought the house).  They also added new pre-hung doors so all of our doors actually shut now (great for guests that don’t appreciate when our fat tabby cat pushes into their room to join them on the bed at night).  They hung 11 doors and two sets of accordion closet doors (major upgrade to reaching into the closets over the old sliding doors). We decided against rehanging closet doors in this room, and you’ll see why soon enough. They switched the swing of the doors on a few rooms and closets as well – so things are feeling much more feng shui. 

 

We also had an electrician come in and center the boob light on the ceiling of this room, as well as move the light switch farther down the wall of the closet because the door to this room swings to the left now, and the old switch is behind the door.  This ended up being a step we really didn’t need to take and pay for, and I’ll explain why in a future post (cliffhanger!).  
 
Last but not least – we have new radiator covers throughout the house!  I feel much better about the lack of probable lead paint that was chipping off every time a section fell off the wall when William decided to touch it. 
 
We did not pay the contractors to do any touchups – so we have a LOT of caulking and painting to do. We even have to touch up the walls with spackle and whatever color paint was in the room around all of the radiators because the old ones were absurdly high and now crappy sheetrock is exposed. But the focus has been to get through all of those tasks in the Big Boy Room before we move onto the other rooms.  Breathe, Kayla, breathe.  At least the construction aspect was done in 4 days by someone else. #worthit

 


So first things first – we caulked and painted the molding. We are pretty brand loyal to Behr paint products due to the fact that we haven’t had any issues, usually can find a color we like made by them, and sheer convenience (Home Depot is about 8 minutes away).  I actually don’t get crazy with all the different ‘whites’ out there, and we used their off-the-shelf Ultra Pure White semi gloss for all the molding and doors.  Next, we painted three of the walls and the ceiling with their off-the-shelf Ultra Pure White flat interior paint.  Easy peasy.  What is nice is that these products are all low odor and no VOC so this preggo can do the most of the painting (I find painting seriously relaxing, even if it takes me double the time to do it than it would take Tom. Anyone else hog all the painting for themselves?).  I kinda insisted on being the lead painter while Tom (and his father) continued with caulking in other rooms.  Even though completely this room is the priority, it all has to get done eventually, right?

 

I suck at white balance.
The men did prep the statement wall with wallpaper primer as suggested by the wallpapering instructions. I wrongfully assumed the primer would actually be white, so I’m glad I did at least a little cutting in with the regular white paint before this went up. The primer is actually a milky color in the can (and stinky, so I took this opportunity to put my feet up downstairs on the couch) and dried fairly clear.  Though fully dried after 1 hour, its stays slightly tacky, and is allegedly going to help with adhering the wallpaper, as well as making this wallpaper easier to remove down the line (only time will tell on that part). Maybe an unnecessary extra step, but given this is our first attempt at wallpapering, we wanted to go by the book for the most part.

 

Fun fact – see that small section unpainted on the ceiling? WE RAN OUT OF PAINT with only a  small section left. So annoying.

The last bit o’ painting that had to occur is inside the closet.  We received some hand-me-down dressers from my parents, and the shorter one fits well in here, so after removing the wooden dowel that was used to hang clothes from (you know so William can’t swing from it) we are going to attach a changing pad to that dresser and change William in this nook until he is out of diapers.  Since there is a lot of white and black going on in the rest of the room, we decided to do something a little more bright in here, that would also hopefully tie in the other colors in the room to make it all look more purposeful.  You can also see in this shot that the door now swings TO THE LEFT! The door is going to get some semi-gloss white but I think I’m going to wait to do all the doors & closets (13!) at once after this baby comes.

Next week: WALLPAPER & CLOSET!!!  Teaser because this molding before and after  is just too good not to show:

Don’t forget to check out the other guest participants on ORC Week 3! And just for fun try and find my link (did I get up early enough to break the top 100 in the linky party? No, no I didn’t.).

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 6

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ORC: The Big Boy Room – Inspiration {ORC Spring 2016: Week 2}

So last week you saw the glorious 70’s vibe this  big boy room was throwing out when we purchased our home just under two years ago.

We ripped up the rugs and had the floors redone before moving in. And there it sat as a catchall until last Fall when we found out we were expecting #2.

It’s a small room, but rather bright, and the blank wall to the right, opposite the doorway, just seemed perfect for something in the ‘statement wall’ category.

I had it in my head I was going to do a ‘paint by number’ mural for several weeks. Something like these:

via EasterWiki
via Apartment Therapy

This last picture was something I remember seeing on a blog YEARS ago and this is only link I was able to find that sourced the photographer. Apparently this is a room for rent at a camp/retreat facility in Illinois.

Camp Wandawega
But the more I looked into it, and tried to source my own paint by number painting from Ebay (as many sites had suggested) the more I realized I was biting off more than I could chew. And admitting that is a lot for me.  Maybe if this was a first kid project, but definitely not for a mom of a toddler.
So it was back to the drawing board, so to speak. We have a mixture of an outer space/safari animal theme in the nursery (I’ll show you someday, “I pomise”), so I kinda wanted to go a little woodland creature with this one.  William is not quite old enough to have a major opinion on these things, so lucky for Tom and I, we get to make all the decisions ourselves.  Tom voted for an awesome toddler bed, of the car or airplane or something else of the really cool variety, and I kept looking for wall inspiration.
Then I saw this image on CupofJo:

 

And I loved the simplicity of the black and white image, allowing everything else that is kid related to be in-your-face colorful, as it happens to be regardless of how much I protest.  This was a photo they found on Ebay that was blown up and made into a wallpaper. But instead of going through old pictures, it got me thinking…oh…wallpaper murals….
Maybe like this one?
The price was right, the size was right, it had decent reviews…so we purchased it from Anthropologie. Months ago, to be honest.  Yes, we thought we’d actually have this room done by Christmas, hahahahahahaahahaahahaha. But! We have made a ton of progress in the past few weekends thanks to some great grandparents that have been coming over to watch the human tornado while Tom and I work upstairs.  And this weekend, we will attempt to put this bad boy up. Wish us luck!
Week 2 of 6 of One Room Challenge in the books. Week 33 of sobriety!  What will come first, the thrilling conclusion to this bedroom makeover, or the baby!?!?  NOBODY KNOWS!!!!
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ORC: The Big Boy Room – Before {ORC Spring 2016: Week 1}

I’m going to skip all the jokes I could make about taking oh, 14 months off from blogging.  I never really expected to take that long of a break, buuut…I did. I thought about posting a clip of the opening 3 seconds of Sid the Science Kid but realized how lame it is to admit that was the first thing that popped into my head as my welcome back post.  #transformationtoparentcomplete #IusedtobecoolIswear

Reasons why I stopped blogging: my baby became a toddler, I’m expecting #2 in a few short weeks, work seems to be busier than ever, you know, life in general. In short, blogging just didn’t make it on the priority list anymore.

Reason why I’m making myself start again now: as mentioned above, and fairly evident in my instagram feed, baby boy #2 is coming soon. I’m 32 weeks now, and in case anyone remembers slash cares, William was born at 37 weeks. I’m told we should just be ready for anything as far as timing – this one could be earlier, could be later, no one friggin knows.  So – as my tax season winds up we are in overdrive to get William transitioned into his “Big Boy Room” and into a toddler bed ASAP.  And what better timing than to document it all and participate in the internet-famous One Room Challenge! This room is getting updated in a short period of time no matter what, so let’s see if I can eek out 5 more posts on the next 5 Thursdays? Challenge, accepted.

Of course you might also recognize some of the Featured Participants as well. I’ll be linking up on Thursdays (hopefully) to the Guest Participants page. Go check out the other 200+ bloggers that are joining in on the fun (or at least pretend to).  And if you landed here from the ORC main page – kudos to you for clicking through this far. I know I’ve gotta be one of the last thumbnails. That is dedication.
So let’s look at the glorious “before” of this room. I’m going way back to the MLS listing. We bought this house back in June of 2014, and had the rugs ripped up and the floors refinished before we moved in.  After that, this room became a catchall for out grown baby junk and whatever else we didn’t want to look at up until about 3 weeks ago.  Feast your eyes:
The real estate photographers get a lot of credit. I haven’t seen this picture in a long time and this room doesn’t look terrible, just majorly dated.  What you can’t really tell from this picture is:
  1. Those radiators have about 10 layers of paint on them, and are constantly falling away from the           wall. Hours of fun for a curious toddler.
  2. There are about 3 different types of molding in this room. Some clamshell, some colonial, some walls have shoe molding, some don’t. This inconsistency is quite consistent throughout our house, by the way. Drives. Me. Insane.
  3. This room is pretty small. Like 8 x 10 small. Trust me, that bed, if it were still there, is way closer to the doorway in person.
  4. And that doorway is in the left corner of the room (basically where the photo is taken from), however, the door opens TO THE RIGHT. Whyyyyyyyy.
  5. The ceiling boob light is about 11 inches to the right of the center of the ceiling. I repeat. Whyyyyyyyyy.
Good news is 1, 2, 4 and 5 are fixable to a satisfying degree for me. And, even better, they actually are now fixed.

So come back next week to either see if I had this kid super early (dear god let me at least make it to 37 weeks again) or to see what we did next in the room.  #nailbiter

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 6

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