Cleaning Out the Kids' Rooms with a Back Hoe & Flower Power

The girls went back to school a little over a week ago, and as promised, I went into their rooms with a trash bag and cleared out the clutter and cleaned them so I could post pictures of my decorating disease.

I may not have told you, but decorating in juvenile themes is one of my passions. However, I tend to pick a theme and go a little overboard with it. Take this room, for example. Can you tell the theme is flowers?

I blame Pottery Barn Kids for this. It started with the quilt. I got it on sale there and I basically decorated the room around it. I traced the flowers from the quilt onto stencil plastic and duplicated them as best I could on the walls.

I will never do this again. It took months, and by the time I was done, I was not a fan of the flowers.



This is Thing 2's room . I'd like to tell you that she loves her room, but . . . I can't.

Initially I let her pick out the colors for her room and she made the simple request of yellow when she was three years old. I started with the yellow, which is what led me to the quilt and the pink as a second color. I needed another color because we already had the chair rail installed which, to me, screams out for two colors. Am I weird or is this not a rule?

Anyway, I started with the yellow and she loved it. Then I added the pink and she started making choking and gagging sounds. At three years old!

I have to confess that I did already know that she wasn't going to be girlie before this incident, but still. How could she not love that quilt?

Next she started dissing the flowers. Seriously, this kid does this stuff to get a rise out of me. Remember, she's a button pusher. Another one of her nicknames is Miss Contrary.

A lot of work went into this room though, so it's going to stay this way until she turns Goth and demands that it be black. Then I'll laugh hysterically and we'll come up with some sort of compromise.

Purple is close to black, right? Purple's a pretty color.



Peanut Head made the trundle bed for Stinkerbell. I pretty much knew what I wanted and he found the plans for it and built it. He's a pretty handy guy and this bed is solid.



I took the pictures when she was three, and I had them printed at Sam's Club as 8x10s and put them in frames I found at Michael's on sale. They're a little crooked right now, I missed that somehow.



Here's one of those little locker bins I found last week. It's perfect for the current books the girls are reading and it's not so big that they can use it as a dumping ground.

Not that they would do that.



I made the curtains and I got the sheers at PBK on sale. If I'm going to pay shipping, it better be on sale. Do you see how wrinkly they are at the bottom? I washed them and the label said "dry clean only." As if. Maybe someday I'll get around to ironing them, but you can bet I won't be dry cleaning them. Ha!



Peanut Head put the shelves up, and they're fine as shelves go, but if I had it to do over again I would just skip them because they're just one more thing to dust and I don't like to dust. If they weren't so high, I could make Thing 2 dust them, but she's a little short yet.




I found this cute rug at Target a couple weeks ago and I used the last of my plasma money on it. I now have $.16 on my plasma debit card. I really need to get back to pimping my plasma again.



Here's the trundle. I didn't want to spring for two PBK quilts, so I made this rag quilt and I really like the way it turned out. It was easy to make too.



Here's a head-on shot of the closet. Peanut Head built the shelves right before I decorated the room. There's a lot of storage here, so much that we have plenty of space to grow into.



I'm not so sure that's a good thing as that just invites more clutter.



I hope you enjoyed the tour of Thing 2's room. I'll post Thing 1's room next week. Thanks for stopping by.