Hi there! Happy Saturday! I decided that it would be okay for me to show rooms in our house that are not perfect - only so when I finally share the "finished" look (which, really, could take years!) you will be even more impressed, ha! ;) So - the playroom, which is very much "in-progress!!" Here is the photo from the realtor listing:
This a unique room, because it includes a door that leads to to the second-story sun porch (a favorite feature of the home that we can't wait to use when it warms up!). The house has four bedrooms, and we were already planning on having the two big kids share a room, so we decided to turn this "extra" room into the playroom, so that we will be able to go in and out to the sun porch at any hour and not have to worry about waking the kids up. This room was originally white and was at the bottom of my "to paint" list - until we moved in and realized that the walls were really, really dirty. It quickly jumped to the top of my "to paint" list!
We ripped off the wallpaper border, only to discover some totally awesome stenciling. I'm kidding. I hate the stenciling. ;) We have yet to paint over that because one section needs a little repair, but one day on a whim I decided to just paint a little white over it to see how it looks - even with one see-through coat, it already looks better!!
In true Emily fashion I quickly chose some paint (without testing a sample), and away we went. I will admit, the Emily style of choosing paint doesn't always work, ha! And, truthfully, the "lighter" of the two paint colors is way darker (or maybe I mean brighter?! Clearly I am not a paint expert!) than I thought it would be. I like the darker color on the wall with the shelves, but I am now wishing I would have painted the other three walls one shade lighter!! I feel like the colors are very misleading in these photos, too. The dark blue is really not as bright as it looks in most of the shots. These were all taken with my iPhone, so they are not super great quality.
Everything in the playroom came from our last playroom...and pretty much everything in the room came from IKEA (book shelves little table, little chairs, rug, kitchen) or Land of Nod (all the bins and the stuffed animal bin, which is really a ball basket). The blue in this first photo seems to be the "truest" to the real color.
At some point we will hang our family photos from the picture rail. We have four that hung over these shelves in the old room, and I love them!! Although, I might need to update them since in them Henry was a baby in them and Ollie was non-existent! We have some vintage toys that I've found at various shops and flea markets that sit on top of the shelves. Sadly, the last few crayons in our crayon melty art were tragically ripped from the canvas, never to be seen again. ;) In these photos you can get a good look at the fabulous stencil job as well as the place that needs to be repaired.
The wall opposite the shelves is long and blank. ;) In our old playroom we had art wires where all the kids' artwork hung. I don't know that it will be possible to do that in this house because it was quite a process to get those wires up, and we aren't totally comfortable putting ginormous holes in the lath and plaster. I was thinking, instead that perhaps we could hang some large bulletin boards from the picture rail along that wall. We shall see!
Look how much better it looks without the stenciling!!
There is one serious design flaw in this room, which is that the closet door and the bedroom door hit each other, and you can't open one without opening or closing the other. This wouldn't be that big of a deal, but it's a playroom, so the kids are constantly going in and out of the closet. We are thinking about just removing the main bedroom door for now so that it's less of a pain! The blues in this photo are definitely not true to color!
We tried to maximize the space in the closet by using a shelf that had previously been in my scrapspace. That big silver thing is our space-age air conditioning in-take. ;)
There are still a lot of things I want to do in this room. When we first moved in, I walked from room to room making lists of things (even the tiniest things) that we wanted fix, and we are slowly crossing things off of them. Here is my list for this room:
- remove wallpaper
- paint walls
- repair section of wall above picture rail
- paint ceiling + above picture rail
- paint all trim and doors (Right now it is cream in all the rooms but one. That needs to change!)
- paint closet
- closet organizer
- replace outlet covers and light switches
- new light fixture (It's a white fan right now...totally fine for the time-being.)
- colorful curtains for the window
- hang pictures/wall art
- hang artwork wire or bulletin boards
- hang poofs (old playroom had cute colorful poofs hanging from the ceiling...would like to do that again)
Hopefully when Justin is done with his busy season we will be able to knock a few items off of this list (and all the others)!! Can't wait to share with you more photos as we get things accomplished! Have a great weekend! :)