in the home improvement realm: Max’s room

Honestly, there hasn’t been a lot of home improvement as of late. I had hoped not only to redo Max’s room this summer, but also the little mudroom/porch/whatever-you-call-it. And patch up the wall in our bedroom that was damaged due to ice dams last winter. And finally finish the odds and ends that I never finished in the kitchen and the hallway. I finished exactly none of that. *very sad sigh*

All that I really managed to do was get a start on Max’s room. As in, I did get it painted. The poor kid got stuck with the smallest (and it is small) bedroom in the house. And the previous owners had used it as a nursery, so it was painted baby blue with a wallpaper moon and stars scattered about. Max was such a trooper about it, not complaining a bit.

But he obviously wanted, and deserved, an update. He came up with a few different color combos before finally settling on orange, white, and black. And I think it was a wise idea to go with the white walls, not only for the sake of making the room seem a little bigger, but also because he really wanted us to put up a strip of color-changing LED lights and the white walls show those off.

Our house is odd in a multitude of ways. It’s old, but not old enough to be cool. More like old enough to be a pain in the ass on a regular basis. 😛  The upstairs, which consists only of Max’s tiny room and Annie’s larger room, has walls which are partially wood and partially some textured sort of panels separated by wooden trim. It’s the textured part of the walls that I repainted. The textured material itself wasn’t hard to paint, but as there are 13 (or is it 14?) of these panels, the trim was sort of a nightmare. The taping, while obviously worth, seemed to take forever.

And as the wall material was that odd texture, there was still a bit of leakage under it, so I did have to go back and do some touch up with an artist’s brush. But I love the finished look. And more importantly, Max loves the finished look!

We also ordered Max a small computer desk and a cool orange office chair, both of which he put together himself. And we did buy and put up the strip of LED lights. So far, we’ve spent well under $200.

But there’s still work to do:

*make headboard

*make a few big pillows

*make some sort of window covering (Max and I haven’t figured out what quite yet)

*possibly make a rug (We can’t afford to replace the carpet now, but what’s there is so ugly. With some input from Max, I whipped up a design to make a latch hook rug. But Max hasn’t decided if he actually wants it or not, as he fears it might impede his office chair. We’re going to play with a few other ideas before committing.)

*replace the knobs on the built-into-the-walls drawers and cupboard doors

I’d love to say that much of it will be done by this time next month, but I’m just not sure. Fingers crossed though.