Child Bedroom Overhaul
Do you remember the post where I had the great idea to do a homemade Christmas. I don’t always learn the first time. This past Christmas season, I got thinking about how I didn’t want more “stuff” in my house. I love dejunking but I’d prefer to just not spend the money on the junk in the first place. I also noted that it was probably time to move our 7 year old out of a toddler bed (life just keeps moving and he wasn’t complaining, don’t judge.) Like most ideas, it started out simple enough. Child #3 needed a new bed. which turned into might as well as make it a bunk and put child #4 in a bigger bed too. People, we should have stopped there and gone to a store, bought a bunk bed and called it a day. I don’t even know what happened but suddenly all 5 kids “needed” new bedroom space. Total child bedroom overhaul for Christmas. What is wrong with us?
We thought of a lot of different ways to make this happen. Many of these were sketches on our shower door with a dry erase marker. Weird place to draw sketches? I agree. I won’t share those because all y’all don’t need to see whether I have a handle on the soap scum. Sadly you miss out on Mike’s mad sketching skills but eventually the brain storming moved to CAD. Here are two of the iterations which feel like they do not give this process justice for time spent. But the nice thing was once we had the basics in CAD then we could just move things around.
Well about a thousand iterations later, we made it through only moderately scathed and it looks great. One child even had the thought to thank us (unsolicited) and state that even if it had been the only thing she’d gotten for Christmas she would have been happy. Someone know how to maintain favorite child status. I kid. I don’t have favorites. But I may have liked her the most for a while.
A couple things. This worked really well for their rooms because we have vaulted ceilings. So lots of vertical space to work with. Also my favorite thing about the lofts are that they can make a mess up there and I can’t see it unless I go looking for it. Here are some pictures of what I found when I went looking for trouble. I couldn’t see it from the floor which was a beautiful thing.
Meaning they can leave half done Lego or K’nex projects up there and come back to it whenever and it doesn’t bother me because it isn’t on my kitchen table or the floor as part of some crazy pain tolerance experiment to see how long it takes to make mom swear or threaten somebody that all their toys are going to be given away. I totally pass that test with flying colors every time by the way.
I also love how the triple bunk bed ended up too. Compact. Also doubles a jungle gym because they can crawl through the different levels. It also left a fun cave-like space that they stash toys and books.
A fun addition was some LED lights. They are great for my kids that are afraid of the dark because they can be lowered to super dim but can be brightened enough for each of them to be able to read. Also, these came with different colors so whatever pretend game they are playing. Blue is swimming in the ocean. Green, they are jungle animals. Red, of course, the ground is lava.
The only thing I would change would be that it would paint itself. I told myself the that I would do that once the weather turned nice and I could open windows but as that time of year draws nearer, I’m finding I’d rather be in my garden than to paint anything. So I guess we’ll see if that ever happens.
