Extreme Makeover - Boys Bedroom Edition

In the spring of 2011, I redid the boys room extreme makeover style. It was a lot of work (roughly 3 weeks) but I learned a lot and now with the benefit of hindsight, feel as though this project was my foray into the world of DIY and becoming a little more handy.

The first stage (or demo stage) included; ripping out the carpet and padding, prying off some chair rail, painting/priming over the old paint scheme, scraping off the pointy plaster stuff on the ceiling (there's a good reason for this), and installing a new receptacle for an overhead light. Fun, right? Lot's of destruction!

Stage two involved making the vision in my head a reality. This involved; laminate installation, crown molding, wiring overhead light to a new switch, wallpapering, and last but not least, skim coating the ceiling. Count your blessings if you don't know what it means to skim coat a ceiling. That's all I've got to say about that!

A couple before pics...

Nursery was Baby Pooh themed... great for a newborn.. lame for 3-1/2 year olds

It was definitely time for a change!

I really has no idea how long this project was going to take but I envisioned letting everyone get one last look at the old room, closing the door and opening it a few days later to everyone's utter amazement. Well, unlike the real Extreme Makeover, I didn't have a team of re-modelers ready to pounce.... so, it took a little longer. But I was able to enlist the "help" of a couple eager little boys...

Once the room was gutted and the ceiling was skim-coated to my satisfaction, things started to move pretty quickly... First the wiring, then the new paint and wallpaper (brick), then the molding, and finally the laminate floor.

Almost done...

I dropped the crown molding about a foot down from the ceiling to function as a tray for rope lights that I snaked around the room's perimeter. The ropes and outlet are completely hidden from floor level. It's only when you turn off the lights and flip the new wall switch that you see this...

It's much cooler in person...

Overall, we wanted the room to grow with them and I think we accomplished this in that different "themes" can be realized simply by accessorizing with the boys favorite thing(s). In June, when I wrapped things up, they were into Cars 2. Perfect, since we already had a bunch of stuff from the first Cars movie!

The finished product...

Oh yeah... the reason I "had" to scrape off the pointy plaster stuff from the ceiling was so I could stick glow-in-the-dark stars up there! Definitely worth it in the end!