What I Did This Year pt.2

Second up was Natalie's room. This one was rough as Natalie has much stronger opinions than Emily and Natalie's ideas of how to make things look good don't always gel with mine. At one point I remember telling Mark I was ready to just put a stick of dynamite in the middle of her room and blast it off the side of the house. In the end, after some compromise on both sides, everything turned out great. (Let that be a lesson to me.)

I found a couple of old pictures that might give you an idea of the "before". It took four coats of paint to cover the dark purple walls!


If you know anything about Natalie, you won't be surprised that she wanted the room to be all blue, but we found a beautiful blue, green and cream quilt that we both loved which became the color scheme for the room. The plan was to paint her room light blue and then do her sink area and the accents around the room in green. Finding blues and greens that complimented each other turned out to be much harder than I thought and I had to call in more than one friend to help me choose paint before we finally found two colors that worked together.


In this shot you can kind of see the green in the sink area. Maybe next year I'll work on my photography skills.


I love bulletin boards and message boards. I think every kid should have a place to hang stuff up and write notes. I made Natalie a magnetic chalk board out of a large frame, sheet metal and chalkboard vinyl. I love how it turned out.

After Natalie's room, I did the girl's toilet. The rooms share a jack-and-jill bath with both girls having their own sinks but a common bath/toilet. I used beadboard wallpaper to do the wainscoting. (Seriously, this stuff is amazing and looks just like real beadboard!) Blue on the walls to match Natalie's side and black and white accents to match Emily's side, and the bath was done.The quote around the top of the walls is a little motherly advice for my two teens. Hey, you've gotta get this stuff in however you can, right? It says "For attractive lips, speak words of kindness. For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people. For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry. True beauty is reflected in the soul." Nice, huh.

Next stop, boy-land.