Not So Scary Anymore..

This is actually a project I finished over the summer, but I finally just took pictures of it this week. Between work, other projects and a LOT of cloudy days, I had an excuse every day for months.

You'll remember from earlier posts that this is the room we've dubbed The Twilight Room. When we first viewed the house it was completely empty, except for two Twilight posters. And the walls were a beautiful striped montage of black, magenta, and purple, with a lovely bright blue carpet. Just delightful.

R claimed this room as his soon after we moved in. He took the desk that the previous owner had left and that's where he had his computer. He doesn't use it much.. maybe once or twice a week. The room wasn't really a priority. We have the guest beds set up in the Guest Bedroom, and R didn't really care about the scary walls (which by this point were primed, but you could still see the stripes peeking through).

However, this spring, I was attempting to organize all of the remaining boxes upstairs and realized that I could empty the majority of them if only I had somewhere to put my excess office supplies. I had boxes and boxes full of art and craft supplies, pens and pencils, notebooks.. etc. Plus a bunch of random stuff like our winter coats (downstairs coat closet isn't very high on our to-do list), all of my gift wrap, and what I call my memory boxes (basically plastic boxes filled with mementos). As I was sitting on the floor amid all of this stuff, I realized that I had a huge closet in the Twilight Room, sitting there basically empty.

In April and May I got to work on the closet.. not as easy as you'd think, seeing as it was covered in hand prints.

Once that was done, I started filling it up. That didn't take long. But I managed to unpack almost every box left in the Guest Room! Plus all of the boxes that I had accumulated in the Twilight Room.

The walls weren't that bad. Two coats of the light yellow paint, over two coats of Kilz covered all of the stripes. There are still a couple spots where you can see a little raised line (whoever painted the stripes taped off the lines and there are some spots where there's a raised line of paint along where the tape was), but only if you look really really close. The trim and windows were a pain because the paint was so dark and I was painting it white. I'm still not 100% done with the doors... they're taking an obnoxious amount of paint!!

Over the summer I moved in some furniture I had in the Guest Room. We got R's childhood bed and I had to rearrange the Guest Room, and all of the furniture didn't fit any more. I moved in his old bookcase and  Madison's papasan chair. We also have an old filing cabinet in here that was left in the house. It's broken and not very eye-pleasing, but it's too heavy for me to move out of the room, let alone down the stairs, so it's staying in here until it bothers R enough to move it (it'll be here for awhile).

In the fall I bought some Ikea curtains for the room. The next time R went to use his computer, he was like "What is all of this? What happened to my office? There are flowery curtains and stuffed animals in here!" It had definitely gone from being his room to mine.. My craft supplies take up one whole wall, there are stuffed animals on the shelves there and on the puppy's papasan chair.. there are flowers on the walls and curtains and there are pink stripped tie-backs on the curtains. His wall does have a nice panoramic view of Fenway (I said, if this was my room I definitely wouldn't have hung THAT up!) and all of his books and CDs and This Old House magazines, etc. by his computer still :)

The room still isn't completely finished (what is in this house?). I haven't painted the ceiling yet and we're planning on getting a new carpet soon. I plan on painting the ceiling and touching up the base trim when we get the new carpet. I also need to finish the doors and install the re-painted hardware.

**Picture disclaimer** I broke our camera. Our good, fancy camera. So these pictures are blurry and not the best (after waiting so long to take them you'd think they'd at least be good!). Sorry.

Madison's corner of the room. It's her favorite spot to sleep.

All that's left of R's space in the room

Bought these frames and pictures at Ikea for a total of $3.  I spray painted the frames black to match everything else in the room.

Curtains from Ikea with ribbon tie-backs. I spray painted the existing curtain rods black.

Bedroom Closet Before/After

Total Cost:

$0 - Everything we already had... paint, hooks, shelves, hangers, boxes... I like this kind of project :)

Bedroom Closet

Our Master Bedroom has two closets, which is two more than most houses the age of ours. One is original, one was added probably in the 50's. The original one is located between the chimney and stairs and is about 7' deep and 30" wide. Before we even moved in, I told R this would be his closet. The other closet is a more "normal" size, about 30" deep and 6' wide. I hang most of my clothes up, plus need a lot of storage, so that closet became mine. I painted/cleaned my closet in October of last year, because I couldn't stand living out of boxes (I'm one of those people who need to see all their clothes in order to choose one). R, however, was perfectly content with his clothes in boxes. Because he didn't care, cleaning and painting his closet kept moving farther and farther down on my list of things to-do. In July I had finally had enough. We were about to go on vacation and I hate leaving the house messy when we're away (it's one of those things my mom ingrained in my head when I was little... you never want to go away and come home to a messy house). I had finally had enough of the boxes of clothes piled up in our bedroom.

It ended up not being as bad as I originally though. Only 1 dead spider and no huge cracks in the walls that needed repairing. All in all, I finished in two days (and I didn't spend all day working.. basically just the afternoons). The first day I spent cleaning out everything we had accumulated in there (boxes, suitcases, misc. stuff we weren't using and didn't have another place for), patching holes in the walls, and painting some of the trim. The second day I painted the door, ceiling, shelves and walls.

Luckily it was a very dry day, so the paint dried incredibly fast and I was even able to organize all of R's stuff in the closet before he came home!

The closet has 2 shelves in the back (about 24" deep). One these I put some long-term storage, pillows, and some of Ryan's stuff that he rarely uses. Underneath the bottom shelf (which is about 3' off the floor) I put our large suitcase and filled it with all of our dufflebags, backpacks, etc., so now when we're packing to go somewhere everything is in one place. On top of that I put our big, thick winter comforter in it's bag. (That's another thing I'm very excited to have a place for... It's white and light blue, and when it's too hot we've just been kicking it onto the floor. It basically spent the whole summer on the floor which means it got dirty from the floor and from the dog that decided that it was a new big huge bed we bought for her). Along the walls are old hooks which I was originally going to replace, but then decided just to paint them. I hung R's belts and ties on them.

Because the closet is so incredibly deep, there are 2 hanging rods. This would not have worked for me because I need to see all of my clothes. For R though, perfection! On the back rod I hung all of his winter clothes and on the front rod, all of his summer clothes! So now when he's looking for something, they're organized so he's not looking through sweatshirts for a polo shirt, but also if we have a cold early fall day, he still has the option to grab a long sleeved shirt if he wants. It also means that season-changing will be easier because rather than spending a whole day unpacking and packing clothes (like I do for my clothes), all I have to do is switch which rod they're hanging on.

The floor in front is open for laundry baskets and other misc. items like our large bed pillows if we're not using them. And yes, every single item from that first picture (in the closet and surrounding it) is all in here... I fit it all :-D