Sneak preview

This is a before picture of Z.'s room, a really, really before picture. It was taken a few days after we moved into the house in 2003 so not only was the room clean, but sparse in comparison to the way it looked recently (I should have taken a picture before we dismantled it, but didn't get to it before A. started taking things out of it). But you can get the idea, it was very pink, very little girl, very unlike the 10 year old (soon to be 11 year old) Z. of today. She had done her best to deface the pinkness with lots of Pokemon stuff, but it was still so not her.




Z.'s room isn't quite done but we got the furniture today and she'll be sleeping in it tonight so I decided to take pictures tonight since it's probably the cleanest it will be from here on out. The view above is from the door to her room (from the hallway, she has three doors in her room, including one to the playroom and one to the bathroom and not including the two closet doors). The armoire is one of the few pieces of furniture from before that we kept, she got a new bed and new bookcase (that cube thing). Her bed is to the left against the wall, and to the right is her closet and the door to the bathroom. Also to the left is the door to the playroom.





We still have to make the neon green lightening bolt that will be over the bed (we'll cut it from plywood and hang it). The bed will have two rolling storage units underneath (A.'s putting them together right now). They are heavy duty, made of the same melamine as the bed, white with black lids. She has 2 other sets of sheets and duvet covers, one has white sheets with a gray and white mottled duvet cover and the other is gray and white sheets with a plain gray duvet. I think we both like the black and white ones best but the other ones will be nice too. Behind the door on the wall (to the right of the photo) is a wall book holder thing we had gotten for her when she was a toddler from Pottery Barn. We put it right back where it had been before the room was painted. It's a good place to put magazines and books that are being read.





She picked out the cool wall clock at Ikea. We also got new lamps (three of them, the tiny clip reading lamp on her bed, a nightstand lamp and a floor lamp) and a neat little alarm clock that you can see through (which she has set to 24 hour time and to beep every hour). The narrow white bookcase was in her room previously, I thought it fit perfectly on that little angled wall (the door is the one out to the hallway).





There's nothing in the cubed bookcase yet. We bought a bunch of green boxes for 4 of the cubes that I still have to put together (same idea as the magazine holders that are in there, those cardboard boxes with the metal corners on the lids). The rest of the shelves we'll keep open for books. Her old bookcase is currently in the playroom and my hope is to empty it and get it out of there, it's just getting too crowded in there and I find that the more stuff that is in the room, the messier she keeps it.

I think I'm probably just as excited (or maybe more so) than Z. is tonight! It's so great to finally see this room come together. I've been feeling and urgency to get these big projects done now while I am feeling relatively good. She needed a new, more grown up room so badly. She also had a pretty big hand in the decorating decisions, the wall colors were her choice (although I brought them down a notch or two on the color chips, knowing that these would be dark enough. I think we had a good mix of hers and my input. I pretty much did all the shopping for furniture and linens, etc. but did not get anything without her approval. She had a blast picking out the clocks and lamps today (and at Ikea they were so cheap that she could pretty much have whatever she wanted). Hopefully this room will last her for long while!