Before And After

We're back to real life around here after a glorious week of spring break for the kids and hubby.  I was so shocked to learn that my wonderful man was planning on taking most of the week off to spend with his little family while the kids were home...after a few seconds of "aww, he's so sweet" my brain went straight to..."think of the projects we can get done!"

We love a good home improvement project.  In fact, at the beginning of our marriage, hubby and I moved from a 2 year old "all finished" home to a 50+ year old fixer-upper just for the projects!  We both enjoy the planning, the work, the hanging out together as we hammer, paint, arrange furniture...it's just who we are, I guess.

This past week, the kids' bedrooms were our projects.  Thomas (the baby) has been in his own room this whole time to keep him from waking his older siblings when he wakes in the night.  In the mean time, all three older kids were crammed into one room.  We've had room to spread them out, but they all love a buddy in their room.

Now though, Thomas is ready to share a room.  The most difficult part of the entire project was to figure out who should share with who.  Do we keep the older kids together since they're such good friends and have the same sleep and wake schedules?  Or do we do boys and girls together?  We went for boys and girls.  My goal is to help Ben and Thomas connect a little bit.  There's 6 years between them, and it won't be long before Ben doesn't want to hang out with the little guy.  Hopefully, this time of bunking together will help them grow to be buddies like it did with Ben and Clara.  

Besides...this way, we got to do a fun girls' room and a fun boys' room ;)

Enough of my chatter - wanna see some pictures?  

Here's the before shot of the room that we decided to use for the girls.  Notice three beds crammed in there and stuff all over the place:

We cleared out the room, negotiated with the girls on paint colors (I talked them down from BRIGHT pink and purple to a slightly less bright pink with a soft yellow), put on the hot-mama painting sweats that really do reach to my armpits if I yank them painfully high enough:

See?  Told ya...hot.

And then got to work.  I'm thrilled with our sweet, bright, airy, and pretty girl room.  The girls love it too.  When Sammy saw it for the first time, she wrapped her arms around herself and said in a soft whisper, "It's boootiful!"  

These beautiful sheer curtains were the inspiration for our paint colors:

I love this sweet photo.  We bought it when I was pregnant with our very first child, and it's hung in one of the kids' rooms ever since.  I don't think I'll ever get rid of it.  

We're not exactly 100% finished.  We have plans to make a big bulletin board to go over each of their beds - a great place to keep all those random works of art instead of having them taped all over the darn place.  Besides, it will break up that giant pink wall a little bit.

The boys' room is finished except for some crown moulding that hubby is working on as I type.  After shots will be available of that room soon...