Colorful Kid Bedroom

The bedrooms in our house are fairly large, and currently we have our three oldest children in the biggest room. When we first moved in two and a half years ago Nathan had this room all to himself. Then when we had Rebekah, Nathan and Mackenzie shared. Now that we have four kids, Rebekah is in there with them too. It took them a little while to get used to sleeping all together, but now it’s going well. There wasn’t much to do in the bedrooms other than cosmetic fixes. I painted it pretty soon after we moved in because it was a very dark pink. These are pictures from when we saw the house before we bought it.

I removed the zebra print border from the ceiling, then did a coat of ceiling paint.

I primed all the walls, then painted with CIL colour Fostoria Glass in eggshell. It’s a very light blue, but I really love this colour for a kid room. I also painted all the trim white with Benjamin Moore Simply White. In the picture below you can see the colour of the floor before Tony refinished it. He refinished the floors in the two bedrooms and the upstairs hallway in April 2015. I remember this very well because we both had strep throat while we were trying to finish these floors. We all moved out of the bedrooms and had mattresses all over the house. Tony and I took turns working on the floors in-between feverish naps.  It was awful, but we got it done and the floors look great.

Tony stained the floors using Minwax Jacobean stain. This is the same stain he used for the stairs. It was the closest colour match to the prefinished hardwood we installed in the living room.

Here is our current arrangement of furniture. We have Rebekah in the corner in the playpen, and we hung curtains from the ceiling to try and keep her from waking up her siblings.

This is Mackenzie’s bed in the picture below. I found it on the side of the road and I thought it would be perfect for her, other than the colour. So I painted it pink using the CIL Smart3 paint for furniture, in the colour Cabana Coral. This paint is fairly drippy so I did thin coats to avoid drips. It took about six coats to cover the original cover. I probably should have primed first.

Nathan’s bed we got off kijiji and Tony spray painted it using Behr semi-gloss paint in Japanese Fern.

All three of their dressers were freebies that I painted white. My favourite though it this tall boy dresser. I found it on the side of the road one day on my way home from work. Can you picture a pregnant lady trying to finagle this dresser into the back of a minivan by herself? It took me a while, but I was so excited about this dresser there was no way I was going to leave it. It doesn’t look too bad in this picture, but the paint was peeling on the top and a bunch of the drawers were wonky, and the whole thing was shaky. Tony fixed it up for me and made it really sturdy, and then I painted it using Annie Sloan chalk paint in Pure White. I did three coats of paint and sanded in between with fine sandpaper, and finished with the Minwax finishing paste. I’ve used three different brands of chalk paint so far, and I have to say that the Annie Sloan is the smoothest. I’m not sure if it’s because of how much sanding I did, but it feels so soft and smooth and I love it. I also spray painted the handles using Rust-Oleum oil rubbed bronze.

All in all I really like how this room turned out. It’s so bright and colourful, and looks so much more clean and modern than when we moved in.