Last Minute Bedroom Changes

Our new house has a bit of a quirk when it comes to the bedrooms. While there are technically 3 bedrooms on the second floor, one of those is only accessible through the first bedroom on the right hand side of the hallway. That created quite the perplexing decorating challenge for me.

At first we decided the back room could be the boys room and the first room (the one you have to walk through) would be their playroom. We would be in the large second bedroom in the front of the house, but the end of the hallway. After a lot of thought and back-and-forth we decided to switch that up. So now we'll be in Bedroom #1 (first one on the right of the hallway), and the boys will be in Bedroom #2. The Back Bedroom will now become our dressing room/sewing room, solving our issue of too-small closets in this 100 year old house.

Doesn't a dres

sing room sound cool an luxurious!?

I love this bright color palette. And I will definitely want a mirror over a desk/dresser since we'll all share one bathroom.

Advantages of New Layout:

• We get a walk-in closet, yay!
• The back bedroom isn't heated, so all of us will be in heated rooms, saving the hassle of putting in a space heater
• I get a sewing room away from curious little hands
• The kids won't be playing in the room adjacent to our neighbors in the duplex, especially since we just found out our neighbor works the night shift so she sleeps during the day while her husband watches their toddler.
  
• Should we have another baby or adopt a baby/toddler we have space, I like to keep room for one more just in case, after our first being a surprise I never want a new baby to cause such an upheaval, better to keep some room just in case.
• If the room sharing thing goes badly we can make the dressing room part nursery and put Gizmo in there in his crib for another year and try again.
  

Disadvantages of New Layout:

• We have no idea what to do with such a big 'closet' area!
• The boys bedroom will need to double as a playroom, this will be an organizational challenge and I hope it won't be a behavior challenge, T-rex has been known to be tempted out of bed by toys being in his bedroom.
• We'll have a slightly smaller bedroom, though it will still be larger than our current one by about 1 foot on each side.

Here are some inspiration I'm drawing from Pinterest for my new dressing room/sewing room:

Craft Caddy

I love Pinterest, like absolutely adore it! I get so many fantastic ideas, and figured I should share some of them.

Here's an idea I found on iheartorganizing.com. Of course hers is fancier with chalkboard paint and everything, but I was able to create a similar look and the same practical function with a simple red metal caddy from Target.

Jen's version:

My version:

Later I might add vinyl letters onto it, but for right now it's plain. My oldest son has an issue with picking stickers (and paint) off of things, so it's best left in its sturdier, plain metal form :)

More Paint!

We just got back from a quick stay up at the new house (it's just 4 hours away) and we got a ton of painting done! We got a lot of the trim downstairs and all but one room of trim upstairs painted. It was this horrid peachy color or just chipped in places before and now it's crisp white, the way it ought to be.

Here is the dining room. See the floors with their last coat of paint, much darker than the previous picture. And the landlord's father kindly volunteered to help out and painted the dining room. Isn't that grey color heavenly? It looks even better in person, I'll need to get a better picture of it soon. It's from For the Love of a House and is a paint match to Benjamin Moore's Ashwood OC-47 in Eggshell (a soft gray/green/putty). They have far better pictures than we do :)

**apparently the new house has a toddler infestation but we don't mind ;-)**

Before

After

Here is the other half of the dining room looking at the stairway. That banister was the ugly peachy color but I saw it as white from the minute we walked in.

Before

After

See, much better when the trim is bright white :) We'll be finishing up the trim, getting the walls completely painted, and cleaning the floors upstairs in preparation for the carpet installers after Christmas. The landlords are being awesome and installing new carpet in the entire second floor before we move in. The old stuff was there before they bought it and in poor repair, it wasn't even wall-to-wall, just cut to fit the rooms with unbound edges. It was time to replace it, it'll look tons better.

Before we left we put the final polyurethane coat on the floors, so they are hard as a rock and *hopefully* won't scratch even when movers come traipsing in soon.

Painting Hardwood Floors

I know, I know, the whole concept of painting HARDWOOD floors is just sacrilege, it's design suicide I'm sure. But that is for people who do 'design', we do something called 'life' instead and our life right now involves a lot of paint...and hardwood floors.

The duplex we're renting is wonderful, 4 bedrooms, 10 foot ceilings, safe area, but the floors were in bad shape. Some prior owner had really let it go so we are working with our landlords to spruce things up a bit since they just bought the place recently. The floors were not salvagable, in fact in most places it wasn't hardwood, it was just a wooden sub-floor, not pretty in the least.

Don't believe me?

Yes, yikes, that is about as bad as it gets. (this was hidden under old carpet which needed to be replaced).

So we did research and found out how to paint wood floors the right way. While good enough is my motto my husband's motto is more like Mike Holmes, "make it right". We met in the middle on this one by painting, but doing it the best way we could. We bought an Oil-based Porch and Floor Paint in the darkest shade that wasn't black. Then we realized it was too light with all those big sunny windows downstairs and it looked too much like we had just painted ugly wood floors. Yes I know that is precisely what we had done, but we wanted it to 'look', from far away, if you squinted, like a nice dark toned laminate flooring. Modern and clean, not brownish-purple and bleh. So back to Lowes we went, and added FOUR shades of black to the paint to get our darker color, which is not-quite-black.

Step 1: sweep floors (check!)
Step 2: sand (check!)
Step 3: sweep again and mop floors (check!)
Step 4: paint first coat (check)
Step 5: paint second coat (check)
Step 6: paint clear polyurethane top coat

And here's the result after just two coats:

See, much better! Or at least we think so.

Next on the to-do list is

• priming the trim and that glorious (sarcastic of course!) wood paneling
• painting the polyurethane coat on the floors for added durability
• painting the entire downstairs, stairway, and upstairs hall
  
• moving the plumbing for the washer/dryer (if our scheme works I'll be done with basement laundry forever, mwahaha!)
• patching holes from said plumbing work
• painting the kitchen
• painting the boys room
• painting our bedroom

Oh, and I have to make a final decision on who will be in which bedroom. My husband has given me an ultimatum on this, he absolutely refuses to repaint any rooms in this house. I don't know why he's so averse to painting, he did a great job on the 3 rooms we repainted here :) So to be nice, and save my marriage, I'll be making a decision and sticking to it!

Creating a Command Center

I've been enjoying filling my Pinterest organization board with images of different command center ideas for the new house. The new house has no coat closet downstairs so I'll need to incorporate coat hooks and some shoe organization.

Here are some of my favorite command centers I'll be borrowing ideas from:

I love that this one has 3 months of wipe-off calendars. This is just generally a great set-up, the white borders on everything make it cohesive and it's got all the basic components I'm looking for: a mail sorter, calendar, bulletin board, key hooks, and it's over a desk.

This command center is very much what I'll be going for, with the bench and baskets for shoes and the calendar, cups for pens/pencils, and file baskets for each member of the family. The only thing I'll need to do differently is have coat hooks and maybe some upper baskets for mittens/hats somewhere. I originally thought above the bench would make sense until I realized that it might be hard to sit down against a wall of coats without them falling down. Still brainstorming there.

Although this is a craft room there are some good ideas here for a command center. These cups would be a good solution for easy access to pencils and pens. The wire basket above it would be good for sorting papers into "To Do" and "To File/Sort" and would get all those papers off of my desk for good!

It really doesn't get better than this Pottery Barn command center. So pretty and cohesive. This one is black too, which might make more sense for us. As renters who couldn't paint we bought all black bookshelves, picture frames, etc. but now my tastes are changing and I find myself drawn to the crisp, clean white decor instead. Not sure how much I will indulge my design sense and how much I will succumb to budget restrictions.

This would be a pretty marker board for jotting down notes or messages for everyone to see on their way out the door.

I'd love to incorporate this project from iheartorganizing.com for our coat hooks but we already have perfectly good coat hooks. Maybe a smaller version of this for my purse and the diaper bag?

Now the blank slate I have to work with:

Those are our freshly painted floors, done in coordination with the landlord. The view is from the edge of the living room looking through it and into the front room. See where the front door is, and that big front room that is kind of awkward since you walk right into it but it's far larger than any foyer or entryway I've ever seen. I'm thinking library/playroom since it has 10 foot ceilings for tall bookshelves. The wall command center, coat hooks and bench would likely go either behind the door or just to the right of the door.

Anyone else have a command center in your home? Does it help you stay organized and on top of things? And is anyone else completely lacking a coat closet? How do you deal with it?