Katie Jane's Room-reno.

Just like Lauren helped can chicken for her Personal Progress project, me and Katie Jane decided that we were going to redecorate her bedroom for Katie's project.  It was supposed to be, SUPPOSED to be a 10 hour project.  We/I spent that much time alone in the fabric store!!  

These are a couple of the before pictures.  Katie's room was cute in the beginning.  I thought I had done a good job.  I had a really cute Pottery Barn quilt and I pretty much decorated the room around it.  I thought that this color was close enough to purple, Katie's favorite color, that she would like it and she wasn't really into what her room looked like when we moved in anyway.  All she wanted was carpet in her room...which is why her room is the only room in the house along with Jay's that has carpet in it.  Everything else is wood and tile.

If I could rip that carpet out today and refinish the wood floors by myself I would do it in a heartbeat!

But the older she got, the more she wanted things changed.  The cute shelves on the wall were too little-girly and my choices were just so not what she wanted.  That feeling goes beyond her bedroom decor as well!

Katie would change the layout of her room almost weekly.  The quilt on her bed is the one she wanted to use in her new bedroom.  This picture is after we had taken everything off the walls...including some chunks of paint that were bubbling and not sticking to the wall anymore.  It looked so white trash!! It turned into an obsession trying to peel the paint off the wall, just like skin peeling after a sunburn.  Am I the only one who likes to do that?

I love getting big chunks!!

I had to keep reminding myself that I was once her age and had a bedroom that I decorated by myself.  Katie had all kinds of things stuck to her walls and cluttering her tables and dresser and desk...which is so annoying to me!  

"Just throw away the trash!!", was something I had to say almost every day to her along with "Doesn't it bother you to walk on your clothes??"

I'm not sure if my mom really cared because I was in the furthest corner in the basement...she never had a reason to come to my room.  She would just stomp on the floor above my room to get my attention or when I was sleeping through my alarm.  But I had an ENTIRE wall of pictures from magazines and posters of my favorite music group, Tears for Fears.  An ENTIRE wall.  Hundreds of pin holes were in that wall.

Today I shudder at the thought!

This is the after.

We got fabric for curtains, fabric for a headboard and we painted the walls, which doesn't sound like a lot, but holy cow, it took forever!  It got to be the night before we were supposed to be finished so she could present what she had done, it was almost midnight and Will was standing there with a drill in his hands waiting for me to tell him where to hang stuff.  I still had all the curtains to sew and was so done with everything and the last thing I could think about was hanging things on walls.

This is her headboard.  Will made the frame and me and Katie put it together.  One thing out of many, many that I've learned through this project is that what you save in money by doing it yourself doesn't compare with the sanity that you lose by doing it yourself.  And I could not believe how much the fabric was...let alone the foam to pad the headboard.  I think my kids were seeing their Christmas flee before their eyes when they heard the total on that shopping day!

All the art we hung on the walls was by Katie herself.  She's a great artist and it was fun putting it all together.  I discovered IKEA frames too...that was a great day!

I let Katie do as much as I could.  It was her project after all.  But that control thing...it was hard to let go!

Willie wasn't allowed near the headboard...so he felt sorry for himself.

photo from Sarah's House - Sarah Richardson...love, love, love her!

In the end, I would have LOVED the room to look like this, but...I didn't have $15,000 to spend, nor did I have the talent.

Katie Jane did a great job and in the end, I hope she got the room that she was hoping for.  A good sign has been that she makes her bed in the morning now and I don't have to walk on clothes to turn off the lamp that she leaves on everyday!  It's WONderful!