The Boys' Room

Continuing the tour of Shady Tree Lane, here's the before pictures of the boys room

It's a good-sized 12 x 12 room that they love sharing, but when we moved in, as you can see, there wasn't a lot of personality in the space.

Look! I did take a few pics of how I did the floor.  So the first step is to pull up all the carpet and the pad and remove the tack strip.  Then you need to clean the floor- now when I was doing the boys room I thought I needed to remove every stinkin' piece of paint and 1985 contractor goodness from the floor- which if I was doing a real concrete acid stain I would have needed to.  But I found Behr semi-translucent concrete stain and for that (and the method I used) you just need it clean (aka- I waisted lost of time and brain cells trying to strip the floor).

For the base color I used baked clay and applied it with a flat paint pad - and remember to paint your self out of the room and not into a corner :)

Then I put the baked clay, a red stain (I can't remember the color), and regular black acrylic artist paint that I waters down a bit into regular garden spray bottles and used my three "guns" to fire away at the floor.  One key I discovered is to shoot from various angles or you'll be able to tell from the drop patterns where the "shooter" was standing when it's done (I felt so CSI!).  Another key is to do the floors FIRST and then paint the wall because this "shooting" style is EXTREMELY messy.

Here's the final outcome of the floor.  Third key- when the sealer says don't step on it for 3 days- they really mean it.  Before 3 days and it won't cure like it's suppose to you and you'll have to patch up spots which is not easy nor is it fun.

For the walls, Mom came down and helped me fabric the walls.

The top part of the walls is a basic cream sheet from Walmart and the bottom is fabulously textured orange fabric that I found on the remnants at Hancocks so it was priced just right.  To cover the seam between the two fabrics I used a black chair railing.

Here it is all finished:

I had enough orange fabric to cover the walls and make curtains.  The shelf above the beds has some greenery and small things but the main purpose is to cover the puck lights I have installed as reading lights over the boys beds.  They turn on by a touch connectors I placed on their bed posts.  The touch sensor has three dimmer settings which makes it nice if I need to come and give medicine to one of the boys at night, I can just slightly turn on the light and not have to turn on the ceiling light to see.

And since the walls are fabric-ed I hung three black bulletin boards by fishing line from the crown molding to give the boys a place to hang their special art work.

Here's a shot of how the light works when it's dark.

So before:

And after:

Happy decorating,