Not the Brady Bunch: Herky Heaven

When we started making our plans to finish the basement and the kids started discussing who was moving into those new basement bedrooms, I told the kids that if they wanted their current rooms or new rooms to be painted/decorated we could work on that. The kids decided that Caleb and Lily would be moving into the new rooms and Nate, Kyndall, Ian and Tylor would be staying in their current rooms. While we have big plans for decorating Caleb and Lily’s new basement rooms, we don’t have any basement rooms to decorate yet. Nate, Kyndall and Tylor all declined to have their rooms done, but Ian was on board for a change in his.

I told Ian that as soon as Deanna moved out, I would set to work on his new room. His requested theme – baseball. I had kinda been hoping he would go with my “Rockstar” idea I suggested, but he wasn’t interested. That’s ok, though. I knew I could come up with something he’d love.

I browsed Pinterest for boys baseball room ideas and came up with a couple things I wanted to incorporate, and the room design started to come together in my head. Ian had originally requested Neon Green wall paint. Neon. Not Lime Green. Neon. Fortunately for my walls, home depot doesn’t sell neon green wall paint. Oh darn! Of course I had to break this to Ian and get him to agree on another color, but I was already designing in my head and had a secret theme to incorporate without telling him. We had discussed my ideas for his basic design and he was on board, so when I told him we couldn’t do neon green and he started to get a little bummed, he was happy to hear that I wanted his room to be Hawkeye colors – his favorite college team. I told him we could still go with his baseball theme, and the “team colors” would be yellow and black.

Deanna moved out May 11^th, and so I had a clean and empty room to work with over Memorial Day Weekend. All the kids were gone, so except for a training run and a fun side trip to Estes Park with my husband, I had 3 whole days to go at it. I had originally hoped to have the whole thing done by Monday night, but as soon as I started to put paint on the walls I knew that wasn’t going to happen. The yellow I bought was a new brand for me. I’d never bough paint at Lowes before, and I really wish I had stuck to what I was used to; especially for such a dark color. I ended up putting 3 coats up, and still didn’t really get the even coverage that I wanted.

I did what I could over the weekend, and did get most of it done. We had to replace the bedroom door, so that was put off until Jerry was ready to work on that for me, but other than that and a few little details, the room was basically done.

When Ian came home on Tuesday, he and Nate were so excited to move Ian out that they dumped all of Ian’s stuff in the room as soon as they could. They were almost done by the time I came home. I was a little mad, because now Ian’s room was a mess and I still had stuff to do in there and I wasn’t about to work around his junk. I told him that until his room was spotless, I wasn’t going to finish working on it, so I expected to come home from San Diego the next Monday night to find it clean. He assured me that I would.

Long story short, I spent the next month telling him that he needed to get that room clean as he continued to let it get worse. Finally, towards the end of our 2 week break with them I told him this was his last chance. If his room wasn’t clean by the time he went back to his moms on Friday, I wasn’t going to finish it at all. It couldn’t be that important to him if he chose to ignore my requests. He did continue to procrastinate on getting it done, but when I came home from work Friday, it was at least in a condition that I could work with. Lucky for him, I actually wanted to finish it.

I spent one more day in the room, priming and painting his door, touching up the accessories, and hanging a closet curtain since his closet doesn’t have a door. I’m happy to say that the room is done, and I think it turned out pretty darn awesome, too. It’s definitely “Ian”. I think he likes, too.

How about a tour?

He only had one previously painted wall in his room. Weird, but not my doing. Anyway here's the before, and the primed wall... I've never attempted to paint over dark paint before and although I figured the primer would work fine on the red, I was a bit skeptical about it covering the chalkboard paint. It worked just fine though :)

Before I hit the walls with the new room color, I left Ian a couple hidden messages. Of course, they got painted over pretty much right away, but it was fun anyway.