Starting Alaire's Room

For some reason Alaire's room ended up pretty close to last on the list : ( sad.  After three or four people  asked me to see her room in one weekend, I decided it was time.  It got a little embarrassing to say I hadn't done anything with it when they were expecting this stellar room.  

Backing up, Alaire was born when we lived in our townhouse and had, what I thought, was a super cute room.

I did the shabby chic bedding from target and painted the walls to match.  The bedskirt was striped so the little nook had the matching stripes.  If you are wondering if those took forever, then the answer is yes.  I actually did them to scale with the stripes in the fabric. (cray cray)

Now, back to her current room. The following pictures are the first few days we moved in.  She was still in a crib and the room was completely blank.  If there wasn't wild paint or boarders on the walls in our house when we moved in, then there was contractor flat  white sprayed on paint.  Oh, and about a billion nail holes and SCREW holes that weren't even put into studs.  The previous owners RULED! ; )

White on white

She has a great walk in closet, which I have some fun ideas for later

We switched her to a big girl bed in December, when she turned two.

This is a picture on her birthday.  We ballooned her room, which kids freaking love btw.

This post is FULL of pictures and is getting super long, so either cut your losses now, or finish what you started.

For those of you who are going to continue on this journey...

These are two of the Michael Miller fabrics I picked up from Fabric.com.  

I will add them to the bedding and window treatments and whatever else I come up with.

Onto the painting.  We decided to pull the dark coral and the palest (is that a word, or is it most pale?) yellow for the wall color and break it up with a dark gray chair rail.  The coral looks kind of blood red in some photos, but in person it is coral.  

This little girl wanted to help.  

Bottom half coral

All of the yellow trimmed out

The painting is finished and ready for chair rail

There are still a few places in the chair rail that look like this, and need to be painted.

So there it is, "Phase 1" of Alaire's bedroom.  I will admit, I kind of got burned out and haven't done much except for buying fabric and painting.  I did hang that wooden giraffe art pictured above, and I started building her some floating shelves for a reading area, but that is really it.  

There are a lot of little projects I have in mind for this room, the main ones consisting of:

• window treatment
• decide on plan and execute duvet and pillows for bedding
• finish and hang floating bookshelves
• find a bird cage to hang from the ceiling (Alaire is in love with them right now and they are everywhere)
• hang bunting or streamers somewhere in the room
• put in a closet organizer on one side of the closet
• "secret project for other side of closet"  (it's something fun for Alaire)
• Light fixture (just say no to boobs lights)
• Make a permanent cover for reading tent (not pictured)

I am going to stop myself there, because the list gets too crazy and somewhere in there we are getting new flooring, which makes me shutter thinking of moving all of the crap treasures and things out of this room : )

So, for now Alaire's room looks a little less sketchy.  Some rainy day I will get up there and get after it, but until then I will just say my husbands least favorite over used on a daily basis quote, "it is what it is."  (I always say that when things don't turn out, dinner isn't cooked, Alaire puts glue on the wall, the dog gets into the garbage, or I half way finish a project.  As crazy as it is, one or more of those types of things happen around here REALLY often : ))