I titled this post ‘Boy room’ because that’s everything it wasn’t when we purchased the home. This room is on the second floor, right in the center of the house. Directly above the dining room to be exact.
The first night we ever came to see the house, It was about 8pm. I had worked a long full day of work, and had daydreamed and talked about this home with clients the entire day. When we first found the home, the listing didn’t show any interior pictures. However, since the outside looked so good I had high hopes that the inside matched. Boy was I wrong. This room particularly stands out to me in my memory….mostly because it was not what you’d think a room should look like during a showing. It had clothes everywhere, (clearly a girls room) reeked of Victoria Secrets Lovespell body spray, and had one of those clear tv’s where you could see all the gadgets inside. Remember those? The room was extremely girly. It had pink carpet, pink woodwork, and pink floral wallpaper. Weirdly I remember it having dark green curtains. Very strange.
I knew in my mind it had potential. Again, another room with those bayed windows. I love that! I could picture boy related things. A clean floor, (lets be real here is a boys floor ever clean?) fresh paint, and many boy related things. A lot of people would have struggled seeing past all that pepto bismo, but I could. I knew it could be beautiful.
that spot you could stand and see every color option of wallpaper and carpet available
Sky our older son was on this adventure with us from the beginning, so lucky for him he got first dibs on what bedroom he wanted. There are 6 bedrooms in this castle so he had a few options. He chose this one. I’m not sure what spoke to him. Maybe it was the fan and popcorn ceiling. Perhaps the extension cord fake wall outlet hidden beneath the wallpaper. A mother will never know.
We began with wallpaper removal right away on this room. This room was in terrible condition under the wallpaper. Lots and lots of plaster cracks. There looks to have been some water damage to this room, which would probably explain the popcorn ceiling cover up. That is something we have yet to remove, but I’m literally counting the days. I truly feel like I can smell a different smell in this room, and I blame the popcorn ceiling. Once the wallpaper was off, we could see that the plaster had been painted blue. Maybe that means there was a boy living in this room at some point. The blue stopped about a foot down from the ceiling, which indicates there was some sort of boarder or picture rail. We will never now. The one foot down section that wasn’t painted blue was raw plaster. This could mean that there was wallpaper boarder here at some time. Who knows.
We didn’t unpack much initially, only because we were doing so much work to the house. This surely proved that kids do NOT need much to be happy. I believe we literally kept out his legos and his Thomas the Train Tracks. I know for sure it was a month before we started moving furniture and toy packed bins in, so when we were finally able to unpack his things, it was like Christmas morning for him.
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After we got the wallpaper down, of course we were dying to rip out the carpet. This meant Sky’s bed and dresser would be temporarily moved to the bedroom across the way. (black glue nightmare room). Lucky for us, this floor gave us no relief. More tiles. More tiles glued to the floors that we would have to scrape. The best way I can describe the smell of these tiles once they were reveled is dog pee mixed with must. It was a terrible smell.
I don’t really believe it was pee, because there were no pet stains, but it’s the best comparison smell wise
pee smelling tiles
Back to the floor scraping we went. My brother in law Kris, Travis’s younger brother helped us a lot in this room. I remember him being here scraping the floor. He was also expecting a baby boy, so he understood time crunch as well. We’d take any help at this point. Time was ticking to get the floors ready up here for Chad, not to mention the baby ticking bomb I had going in my belly. I didn’t want any of this work or smells going on with a new baby in the house. It was the same process again. Tiles first, then felt fuzzy stuff, then black glue, then floor planing. Wow that’s a lot of steps.
removing strips of felt hell
I remember during this room my cousins stopping over to pick something up from me. I believe an old window. (Yes I do give away my hoarded things sometimes.) I truly remember their faces of horror and worry for us when they saw the inside of the house. Let me explain. I think they knew we had the capability of getting this house under control, but it probably looked pretty bad considering I was very pregnant, our younger son was running wild, we had no furniture in our house, and we were going to town in just about every room. All at once. At this time, we hardly let anyone see the house. It was pretty bad. Not because of the wallpaper and carpet, but because of all the things we were ripping out and exposing and all the things that needed work. Lucky for them they saw this gem at her worst. They didn’t stay long, I’m sure the smell had something to do with it.
planing floor
After getting the floor planed and all carpet nails pulled out, Chad was able to move in and do his work. Thankfully, another floor would be saved. It would breathe again and it would be beautiful. It forever blows my mind that these floors are 124 years old. 124 years of people walking on them. I truly daydream often of what life was like here 100+ years ago. Even though we live here and it’s our home, I believe it’s our job to take care of it, and the original homeowners will forever be the real owners. Someday when I go to heaven I totally plan on talking to them. I sure hope that they’re there.
Sky’s favorite color is green, so what better color to paint his bedroom? Complete with the trendy chalk wall option. I painted this room literally like days before I gave birth. I believe I painted the entire thing when Travis was at work and Sky was at school. I was in high nesting phase. The babies room was done at this point, so I wanted nothing more then for Sky to have a stable situation, bedroom wise. It was already bad enough that he had no room for over a month, a new baby was coming to our lives, anddddd we just moved our whole lives into a big smelly house.
check out those mini jeans on the bed <3
I made the sarcastic “trendy chalkboard wall” comment with a smirk on my face. Reason being this. Everyone thinks a chalkboard wall is SOOOO cool. Let me tell you. It’s awful to work with. It’s the runniest paint you’ve ever used, (not to mention black runny paint on white baseboards is not cool) and it only looks perfectly black like this when you first paint it. The second you want to use it, you have to “season” the chalkboard wall. This means cover the whole wall in chalk, and then erase it. This makes for a super fun mess. Then, it forever looks dirty. I’m not a big fan. It was a cool idea, but I don’t think I would use it again. I had it in our kitchen in the bungalow as well, but that for some reason was a little easier to keep clean. Probably because I was the one using it, not a 5 year old boy in charge of erasers which I have for real caught him in a eraser pounding party with his cousin Issac. Fun times. Point of this rant, is I would think long and hard before using.
looks crispy in the photo but it’s allllll a lie.
This same night, we decided to set up his room, and unpack some toys. This was the night it felt like Christmas. Boy did we have way to many toys. I have very much put a stop to that after this experience.
I had ordered two rugs for the boys rooms. A blue one and a green one. Both from overstock. They’re actually “inside outside” rugs. I like that style of rug for their rooms because it’s easy to push trucks on and play on. They’re thinner then a normal rug but not too thin. Very durable and easy to keep clean. I’d say a no brainer for two little boys.
That antique bed you see in the picture above was my bed growing up. It’s very old, I’d say like 1920’s. I slept on this bed the night before my wedding. At that time it was still at my parents house, set up in my old room. It’s very special to me and I love that my kids get to use it now. (Although Sky begs for bunkbeds all the time and I do think it’d be super cool.)
We painted the radiator in this room, and like always it made a huge difference. Fresh shiny paint on a radiator really makes it feel like a piece of art in the room. This room stays extra toasty in the winter. Probably one of the warmest rooms in the house actually. Spray paint is seriously a genius invention. Makes dingy and dirty to shiny and glam in seconds. I would highly recommend considering this if your lucky enough to have radiant heat and have cast iron radiators like we do.
dull and dingy
shiny and pretty
I do love the way this room turned out. It’s what I imagined. It’s a little boys room, and it’s perfect. You’d never know that this room reeked of Lovespell and had green curtains with pink everything else. It’s bright and cheery and really quite lovely. Sky loves it, which really is what matters. He’s quite the organizer these days of his room and keeps it in tip top shape. Works for me! Even two years later, he mostly plays with only his legos. Kids really don’t need much. It’s amazing how content they are with just a few things. When going through these pics, the pictures of it “feeling like Christmas” make me cringe. There are a million toys in those pics! I’ve grown and changed so much in the last two years and I have gotten rid of tons of things. All the stuff we fill our lives with to find happiness is just stuff. Clutter. I’m so over that. Life is a whole lot easier with a lot less stuff. It also makes me see the beauty of my home, which truly makes me happy. I believe we are our happiest when we are surrounded by beauty. This is why I’m writing this, and this is why I do the house thing.
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