A Boy's Room Update - Part I

Our son has been in desperate need of a room update for over a year now. His room is small, measuring only 8x11 feet. We needed a way to provide more storage, particularly for his legos. A desk was high on his priority list, but the small size of the room proved to be a huge challenge!
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Allow me to provide some story about how his room came to be in it's most current state that is now in need of updating...

My dad, who passed away in May of 2018, built our three kids a super sweet playhouse that lived in our finished basement for several years. Matching paint and little curtains to go with our basement made it even more special. Our kids played for hours in this playhouse. The fact that Dad made it was the best part!
Fast forward several years once My Home Matters, LLC was born. I ran out of space very quickly and needed a place to be able to store my finished items that live in our online shop. The kids were getting to the point that they were outgrowing the playhouse.
We made the decision to take that corner of the basement and turn it into a "corner shop" for my items. The plan was that the playhouse would go into storage (aka the shed) and saved for grandchildren. However, the day my husband started taking the unit apart, my youngest child, the whose room update this blog post is about, started to cry. "But Grandpa Bud made that. How can we just put it in the shed?" I, too, admit that I couldn't hold back tears when the screws started to be loosened. Our kiddo asked, "Can I just put it in my room and sleep inside of it?"

THIS WAS A BIG ASK.

Allow me to tell the story as Sophia Petrillo from The Golden Girls (I know I'm dating myself here) would start a story... "Picture it. Sicily....1922..." In our case,

Picture it. The playhouse...2018 (or maybe it was 2017). It's size being 4ft by 8ft and kiddo #3 wanting it to now reside in his 8x11 foot room would mean it could go only on one wall, the non-window wall. No more available space would be left for anything other than the dresser and an L-shaped walkway to his closet.

My husband said, as my son's tears still filled his eyes, "Why don't we just let him use it in his room for a year or so... at least until the novelty wears off. I know it's not convenient, but I'm willing to put it up even if only for a year, just to honor your Dad and keep him happy and using it for a little while longer."

I mean how can one argue with that kind of reasoning?

So, in the room it went. A make-shift railing on the top was needed so that he could climb up on top and not fall off. It also meant building a ladder for him to climb up on the "roof" where his shelves would have to go. The Ikea bookcase flipped on it's side and moved up on top so that he'd have a loft of sorts to go up to and read on his bean bag chair.
A roll-out mattress that we had for sleepovers was perfect to use inside since his mattress was too long (and I have no idea how we'd have gotten that inside). In went shelves and lights and a poster and pillows and he was happy as a clam!
But it gold old climbing in there. So he started sleeping on top...on just a carpeted piece of plywood. And he slept well that way! I don't know about you but I'd be paying for chiropractor visits on a daily basis if I slept like that!
Older and older the situation became...the storage became more of an issue and he started just putting everything inside the playhouse just to be able to move around the room enough and get to his closet. He had no where to keep his legos so, even though they had bins, the bins kept stacking up inside his tiny closet which meant his clothes started piling up all over.

AND THIS MOMMA STARTED TO LOSE HER MIND.

Something had to be done. One year ago, the original plan was that my husband was going to build him a loft bed of sorts. There were several factors that we had to consider with the addition of a loft bed.

• The bed could not be higher than the window.
• Ceiling height in our home is 8-feet.
• A loft bed would make the room feel closed off and smaller.
• My husband's busy season kicks in when the weather breaks OR roughly around the start of March/April, so we had to get our thoughts together and come up with a plan while he still had the time.

As many of you can attest, the months go by quickly and it's so hard to find time to get these things done when you are running to basketball games and practices for two boys and dance classes for a daughter. (And I don't know how those of you with more than three kids manage!) But winter quickly turned to spring and spring turned to summer and, well, here we are again a year later.

The room has several more things to do, but first... THE BED.

We found this loft bed with storage shelves and pull out desk on Amazon. Yep. The idea of Mr. Home Matters making the loft bed for this room update was quickly ditched and we purchased a bed. What we liked was that the desk could be pulled out when needed and pushed in when not in use.

Another advantage is that the bed is raised up enough to allow for shelves below. It's not as high as a loft but not low like a regular bed. Daniel likes the fact that he has a cool hide-out underneath - at least while he still can fit!
After waiting a whopping three whole days for the bed to arrive, and then 4.5 hours for good 'ole Dad to put it all together, it was finally usable. (I mean to a 10-year old, those three days and 4.5 hours felt like forever!) I had gotten a duvet cover at Ikea last year so this room was going to boast more gray and less reds. We decided it would be less sports-oriented and more "motivationally" oriented. But there is still work to be done.

So what have we gotten done other than the bed as far as this room update goes?

1. Daniel learned how to make a chunky blanket since he was intrigued by one of our last workshops.
2. I asked Daniel for a quote he liked and he blurted out a saying he just made up on the fly and I LOVE IT! I knew we had to make that into a sign and hang it in the room!
3. We added this swivel lamp that will work for both his desk and while reading in bed.
4. I purchased a small carpet.
5. A little storage bench we wanted to keep (for, go figure... storage!) was looking pretty ragged so I recovered it with some fabric I had leftover from another project (coming in next week's post).
6. I found a couple of motivational pillow covers...I'll give you a look at one of them for now!
7. The medal holder and book bin went up right beside the bed within easy reach of the desk as well.
8. I painted his mirror from red to black.
9. The picture ledges that had been inside the playhouse now hang on the wall beside the bed (you'll have to wait until next week to see those, too).
10. I swapped out the red curtain for some gray ones from Target.
11. We all like the stripes so all I did was some touch up on the walls.

Next week, I'll be back with the finished room update! I hope you'll come back to see!