We have been living in our five year house for 17 years now!  Anyone else out there like that??   Now our house is slowly but surely becoming our forever home!  Over the last 17 years we have redone parts of the house that have made it much more conducive to living with 5 people in only 1400 square feet!

A few years ago we redid the kitchen and I LOVE it.  I has made our house so much more livable and I don’t regret a thing!  It has been a few years since we have done anything with the house and I was starting to get the itch.  We REALLY need to do the bathrooms, but that is going to be a big (and fairly expensive) project and we aren’t ready for that yet.  You can see the kitchen remodel if you follow the links at the bottom of this post.

My husband and mentioned that he thought it was time that we got rid of the gigantic bunk beds we have in the room our younger boys share.  He should know not to say stuff like that.  A few hours later I was browsing Facebook Marketplace and found 2 matching twin beds that had full storage drawers underneath (which was a must as there are two growing boys sharing a fairly small bedroom).  A flurry of emails back and forth and we arranged to pick them up on Saturday.  Then I got to work cleaning up our bunk beds, taking photos, taking apart the beds and listing them on Facebook Marketplace.  I sold them the next day for the same price we bought them for over 10 yeas ago.  Score!  I loved that we sold it to a lady who had three boys that were the EXACT same ages our boys were when we bought the bed.

Here is what the room looked like before.  It was a cute cowboy themed room but it was kind of dark and dirty and was stuffed to the gills.  Of course this is right before I took the beds down so it was the cleanest it has even been in this picture.  It has been a great bed for us for the last 10 year but it takes up SO. MUCH. ROOM.

You know how projects tend to snowball, right?  What started as new beds morphed into a complete bedroom overhaul.

That room hadn’t been painted or redone since Makai moved into that room when Tanner was born.  Which means we painted that room and decorated it in 2005.  It still had all pictures of Makai on the wall and he hasn’t slept in that room over 8 years, so was time for a change.   And what better time than when you are moving old furniture out and new furniture in, right?

So what started as a comment by my husband on Wednesday turned into a full fledged room makeover by the weekend.  We don’t have a ton of discretionary income right now so I had to do this on a budget!!  Want to see how I redid this room on a serious budget???

Trying to come up with a theme for a growing boys was tricky but thanks to Pinterest we decided to go with a mountain theme.  I still love the gray colors I used in the kitchen a few years ago (and you know how hard it is to pick good paint colors) so I went into Home Depot and got one shade darker and one shade lighter than I had used in the kitchen.  Thankfully, I only had to get one gallon of the really light color (for the main color) and one small quart for the darker color.  We had leftover paint from the kitchen for the medium color.

The paint is the Marquee Behr brand and it is expensive but it covers so amazingly well that you only need one coat so it saved me money because I only had to buy one gallon instead of two.  Most of the day on Saturday was spent painting the room.  I totally free-handed the mountains and didn’t have to use tape (thanks to a steady hand and the great quality of the paint).  I even made some little mountains above the door so the boys could see them from their beds.  They love it!

Accent Wall

I wanted to make the room a bit more mountainy so I had the idea to put wood planks on one wall.  We had some friends do this same plank walling in their house last year and it looks great.  So while I was at Home Depot getting paint I picked up a few boxes of this barn wood, rustic wall board.  Our friends were gracious enough to give us a box of their scraps and a few full boards that they didn’t end up using.   I love the way this wall turned out.  Thanks for the scraps Burges!

Friends……the thing I am most proud of about this project is this.  This pile of scraps.  This is ALL that is left.  I jigsawed my way through this wall and made it work with what we had so that I didn’t have to go buy another box.  Chris got me started on the wall and we did the first 1/3 of the wall together.  Then he headed to the mountains for a night and I REALLY wanted to finish the project, so I did it all by myself.

My dad built our entire house as I was growing up so he taught me well.  Disclaimer:  there is a small strip under the window that didn’t get done, but we are going to take an old fence post and rip it to the correct width and use that so we don’t have to open a new box.  But who knows when that will happen.  For now it is covered by the curtains so out of sight, out of mind, right?

Storage

We had an old bookshelf that Chris’ dad made years ago and while it worked before, we needed one that was bigger and taller.  A trip to IKEA and 20 minutes of building and we had a new, white bookshelf that holds all of the boys books, plus they each get a box to store their treasures (crap).

We also got rid of the dresser my dad made, which was sad but it was too big for the space and just wasn’t working for us.  So I got this cube organizer from Target and some bins to hold socks/undies/etc.

My favorite part of the room is the stuffed animal holder.  Stuffed animals are the bane of my existence.  The kids love them and hoard them and always beg for more and try to win them in claw machines and talk their grandparents into buying them.  We paired them down a bit (meaning we got rid of about 10 of the 100 we own) and then I got this animal net (from Amazon).  Now they hang in the air and they aren’t taking over the room.  Hallelujah!!!!

Lighting

My favorite design piece in the room is the lighting!  Our house was built without overhead lighting in the room.  What the what???  Hello cheap and lazy builder!  So we always struggle with lighting in the rooms.  I decided I wanted a lantern look and I wanted each boy to be able to control their own lighting from their own bed!

An IKEA lantern ($15) and a lamp cord and chandelier light bulb ($5) and boom…..we were in business.  Make sure you have a lantern that you can either take the lid off of or that you can fish the cord down through.  Also, I used an LED bulb that stays very cool and also the lantern is vented at the top and bottom so air can flow through it and it won’t get too hot!  I hung the lanterns from the wall using the old brackets for the old curtains so no expense there.  They love being able to control their own light and read in bed!

Bargains

I hit Walmart right when all of their dorm room stuff went on clearance so I got these super soft gray blankets for $5 each and the black trash can for $1.

I wasn’t planning on buying new curtains (yet) but as I was at IKEA for the bookshelf and lanterns I found these awesome curtains in the clearance section for only $20 (the same exact pair were in the package for $40 but I got the clearance ones because they were out of package).  They are super thick and block out a lot of light, which is exactly what I was looking for.   They might need to be hemmed later but for now, they work.

These little white robes hooks at Target for $3.19 for both are perfect so the boys can hang their bathrobes and towels.

My awesome husband (who totally went with the flow and didn’t complain at all about this project- thanks babe) found an old shelf in the garage and some brackets left over from another project and cut it to fit in between the beds so the boys could have a place to put their books, water glasses and fans.

We have also used Facebook Marketplace (which I LOVE) to sell all of the stuff we didn’t need anymore, making this project almost pay for itself!

Done in Record Time

The hardest part of this remodel was sifting through years of kids stuff.  A hoarder I am NOT, in fact my family makes fun of me that I throw everything away (guilty) but the amount of stuff jammed in that room was amazing!  I had to go through most of  it when they weren’t around and throw away all of the stuff that I thought was useless.  Then I made a pile for each of them and they had to go through that and get rid of some of it.  I was really proud that they were able to sift it down to a small box.  Although there were a few 10 year old tears when it came time to get rid of some stuffed animals.

I am also really proud that I started looking for beds on Wednesday (the 9/5) and I was completely DONE with this project (doing 90% of it all on my own) by Sunday (9/16) all while still working, cooking, running car pool and doing normal life.  It just about killed me, but it is DONE and I love how it turned out.

What do you think?  Most importantly the boys LOVE it and they have thanked me over and over for redoing their room.  Apparently it was much overdue!  And they got to keep some of their Legos out on display so they are ecstatic.

Maybe someday we will replace the doors, scrape the popcorn ceiling and get new moldings, but let’s not get out of hand!  Thankfully the project didn’t snow ball that much!

Here are the links to the Kitchen Remodel we did a few years ago.  Thanks for following along friends!

Part One, Part Two, Part Three.