Bedroom Makeover

I have such awesome friends.  And the way I know that is because they are willing to be honest with me and commit a ton of service hours and sacrifice their time for me.  A few weeks ago when I was out with Tiffany and Chris, they were talking to me about doing a makeover to my bedroom to surprise Tom (apparently they picked up on the subtle hints that Tom wished our room was a bit nicer than it currently was and they are honest enough to admit my room needs help).  We knew that in three weeks Tom would be going down to St. George with his sisters to run in the St. George Marathon for his ninth time, so we thought it’d be the perfect opportunity to do the project.  So the following weekend, while Tom was out of town on a road trip with his friends (that’s another story), I cleaned up our room.  I got rid of the bassinette that had been in our room for nearly three years and was becoming the catch-all for everything,

 

I cleaned up the other clutter, the closet, dusted, etc.  It was a fun “pre-surprise” for what was coming in a few weeks.  Here are the before pictures of our room (Since Tom was out of town, only my pillows are on the bed).

Missed-matched night stands.  Tom’s is my parents old one, I think from when they got married.

 

My night stand and clock are from when I was in third grade!  They still work great :)

 

Cheap Walmart dressers we’ve had since before we had kids.

Tiffany, Chris and I got together one night at Chris’ house to figure out colors, furniture, decorations, etc. 

Then one morning Chris and I ran to Ikea and picked up the bedding, pillows, etc. to get started and match colors.

Luckily Jeff had to paint a bird house for scouts, so it was a good excuse to have Tom get the paint box down.  There were so many sneaky things I had to do to keep this a secret!

So one afternoon we painted Jeff’s birdhouse, but I also painted an old mirror that my grandma gave us back when we got married (it was in her living room before and is probably from the 50’s), an urn we use as our coin jar, and a picture frame.  I thought Tom would notice the coin jar missing from his dresser, but he didn’t.  He did find the bag of coins though, and I had to come up with a quick story to cover my tracks (“oh that’s where that money went!  I was going to use it for preschool and Sophie must’ve hid it in her closet”).

Chris was awesome and hemmed my curtains that have always been too long.

One of the best parts of the room are the pictures above our bed.  Chris gave me the idea and I loved it!  I found pictures of places that represent Tom and I: Disneyworld (our honeymoon trip), the Caribbean (our favorite vacation spot) and Hard Rock Cafe (Tom’s tradition on trips).  The forth picture is my favorite picture of Tom and I taken over six years ago.  I got permission from the photo studio to enlarge the photo we already had so I took it to Walmart to do so.  I decided to do the pictures in blue and white, since our room would have blue in it.  So I ordered our photo in blue and then ordered the other photos online in blue as well.  However, when I went to pick up the internet pictures, they were black and white, not blue!  I figured it’d be easier to change our scanned photo to black than change the other three to blue, so I took another trip to Walmart to order the new picture.  However, there photo center was down and I had to drive to a different Walmart to re-do it.  When ordering the photo I didn’t click on “black & white” because the original photo was already black and white.  So I went back again to pick up the replacement picture (they were really good about exchanging my photos for free), but it looked green!  When I held it next to the other photos, it was green!  So I went back to Walmart AGAIN to order it in black & white this time.  When I went back for the seventh time to pick up the photo, it didn’t look any different.  I was so fed up with the hassle!  However, the lady showed me that there was a slight difference and the new picture was slightly more black.  So I went with it.  I could still tell a slight difference when held next to the other photos, but once it was up on the wall, you couldn’t tell.  And I love the pics, despite the work!

 

The Wednesday before the big weekend, I skipped out on Young Women’s and us girls went to Ikea to pick up the furniture.  The only hiccup we had were the night stands I wanted and that went with the set were out of stock.  We found some other ones that worked though, and were cheaper so all was well.  Tiffany and Chris had fun picking out decor for the room.  I’m easy going and they know what they’re talking about, so I went with it.

Friday morning (Oct. 3) Tom left nice and early for St. George and I quickly got started moving dressers out of the room, other furniture away from the walls and stuff off the walls and Chris came over so we could start painting.  Soon Tiffany arrived and we got the first coat on pretty quick. We took a break midway through the day and ran to Walmart to pick up the bench I’d ordered, have lunch, Tiff picked up her kids from school and Chris helped put the bench together while I took care of my kids who were just getting home from school (Nick was home to take care of their kids that day, so that was nice to have Chris all to myself that day and Tiffany’s 12 year old didn’t have school so it was nice to have her as the babysitter at my house :) That afternoon, Tiffany brought her kids over, including a one-year-old she watches and so we were painting in the room while nine kids were running around outside and in the basement.   

It took us most of the day to get the painting done.  That night I took the kids to Arby’s for dinner and then we picked up the house, the paint mess, vacuumed, etc.

That night I slept on my bed in the middle of the room with stinky paint, no furniture or curtains.  It was weird.

 

Chris and her husband, Nick put together most of the furniture at their house.  So Saturday morning the moving crew arrived.  Tiffany’s husband, Kenny was nice to loan us his truck and to help haul in the furniture.

 

Then we started putting the bed together.  This was the fun part, putting the room together!

I felt bad, it was Cedric’s birthday and my kids were pretty much tending themselves.  At one point we had to run back to Ikea to get bed slats (the box spring made it too high) and to Target to get a hamper and baskets for the bench.  So I left Lily to babysit and asked her to feed the kids.  She said they told her they didn’t want to eat, so she never fed them, but she did put Sophie down for a nap for me.  The poor birthday boy came to me in tears around 4pm because he was so hungry.  I gave him a snack and we went out to dinner that night for his birthday.

  We continued to work into the afternoon.

Chris and I got pretty close and personal when it came to hanging the pictures. 

 

Finally, about seven hours later the room was finished!

Everything turned out so cute!  I couldn’t stop smiling!  My favorite was when Sophie woke up from her nap and saw the room for the first time all done.  She walked in saying things like “Wow!  I like your bed! Mirror!  I like your room!” etc.

 

I showed the room to a few people that came over (Tom’s parents and my sister, Aimee and niece, Aubree), but I couldn’t wait to show Tom!

Sunday was General Conference for our church so we watched it on TV.  It also gave me time to catch up on all the other things around the house I’d neglected all weekend (I still had birthday party stuff to clean up from Cedric’s party on Thursday).

Before I knew it, Tom was less than an hour away from home.  He sent me a link so I knew when he’d be home (he knows I like that kind of stuff) so I knew how close he was and when to be ready.  Pretty soon he walked in the door around 5pm.  The boys had gone and hid in our room so they could jump out and say “surprise”.  However, Tom got busy picking burs out of his shoes that had gotten stuck there at his sister’s house and I couldn’t stand waiting much longer.  I finally told him the kids were hiding and wanted him to find them (which they often do) and that he could clean his shoes later.  Then I was worried he’d look in the boys room where the old dresser was sitting or Sophie’s room where the old night stands were, so I told him “I think they’re in our room”.  Luckily he went straight there.  He opened the door and said “are they hiding… something’s different in here?”  And the boys jumped out saying “surprise”  Tom was quite surprised!

 

He liked it and I was excited to show him.

    

I asked if he had any idea I was doing this and the only thing he knew about was the bench.  He had seen an email conformation saying it was ready to be picked up, but I’d been wanting a bench for a while so he didn’t think anything more of it.

Now I got to finish transferring everything from the old furniture to the new and figure out what to do with all the old stuff.  Now I want to do the rest of my house, since it’s so blah compared to our room.  However, even though I didn’t go into debt and used my own money to do the makeover, I think the rest of the house will have to wait.

Thanks Tiffany and Chris! I love the room and you guys too!