Recently—well at the end of July—the wife and I began a journey to redecorate and makeover our two sons bedrooms. The reasoning was two fold; one increase property value for possible resale in near future, and two increase the boys happiness prior to giving birth to their new baby brother/sister. Although this journey was started with the best of intentions it ended up taking three weeks and teaching us a lot of lessons about painting, baseboard, staining wood and renting tools from Home Depot.

To start off I’m going to show pictures of the rooms before we began, they are empty, but they only had mattresses on the floor and some toys, no other furniture.

This is the doorway of the rooms, as you can see pretty standard spec house fare.

Here is the closet, complete with mini-wardrobe. The table is Liam’s for building with LEGO bricks, it will get a nice hemlock trim around the back corner before we are through in order to keep LEGO bricks up off the floor and out of the floor vents (which we covered with screen on the bottoms just in case.)

And the corner, see the nice curtains? Oh, how I love stapled material to the window casing!

As you can see we had our work cut out for us. we needed to paint, remove old baseboards and casings, replace said baseboards and casings with new stained hemlock, hang curtains, replaces the light switches with more modern ones, replace all outlet covers with polished nickel, assemble new furniture, paint clouds, vacuum and clean carpets, decorate and then collapse. All that times two. In the end it was quite worth it and the boys are very happy with their new rooms.

Some funny things that happened during the process included. Me electrocuting myself, as I only turned off the juice to outlets and not the lights then grabbed the exposed light switch to remove it, mmmmm, tingly!

We rented a nail gun from Home depot to complete the baseboard and casing installation, as I couldn’t nail by hand without disturbing the peace—literally. Home depot gave us the wrong fuel cells and instructed us to load them upside down, so fuel leaked into the room while I fruitlessly attempted to pump nails in the wall. They then said they would give us an extra day for free for the trouble, then tried to charge me for that extra “free” day when I returned the gun. needless to say we purchased a nail gun from Wal-Mart to finish the house. Home Depot sucks!

We didn’t buy enough paint to finish either room, but with Bryce’s yellow and my muscles I got the single gallon to make due, but we had to go and buy more paint for Liam’s blue room as it just would go as far. White stands out much more on blue than yellow

All in all it was a great adventure, and this post is long overdue, but better late than never huh?

And now some “after” pics…

The Bat Cave;

Bryce’s new room with chair and Bryce pretending to read his LEGO catalog.

Bryce’s new bed decked out in Batman gear!!

Bryce’s new closet, taking it to a whole ’nuther lebel!

And the exit door from the “batcave”.

The Fortress of Solitude;

A young inventor at work in his lab!

Liam prefers the man of steel to the dark knight!

Ah, the clothes, they look so much better surrounded in blue!

And the Fortress of Solitude’s exit.

Wow, what lucky boys I have, glad they appreciated the work Amy and I put in.