It was time for a change. Back in '02, we had designed The Boy's room like a castle: castle walls, castle themed bedspread and curtains, coat of arms/family crest, 'drawbridge' closet doors, lantern-like lights, and hammered "iron" drawer pulls. I even made sure that I painted smaller "stones" around the window and doors, and included keystones at the top of each. We also included a purple door, requested by The Boy, hooks for his various swords, and a sky blue ceiling, complete with clouds. I am not clear, now, why I felt that a castle room would have no ceiling and be open to the sky. As with all the other rooms in my home, I never asked my landlord for permission to paint. I just went ahead with it. I made sure to choose all light colors so that it would not be difficult to paint over down the line. I had a lot of fun creating that room, and we were all very pleased with the results:
At the time, I did not plan to be living in the same apartment 5 or 6 years later, and thought we would only change the room when it was time to move out, and that change would be to slap some primer over the walls and ceiling, so that the landlord could easily paint over it. But here we are, years later. The Boy is 12 (nearly 13!) years old, attending middle school, and in the midst of becoming a young man. We outgrew the castle room. I had been thinking about it for a while, and when The Boy brought it up in January, we decided we would repaint his room over February vacation. A few weeks ago,
I made a new quilt for his bed. Toward the end of last week, we moved everything we could out of the room. Last weekend, while he was with DF, I prepped his room and bought all the supplies. And this week, we painted his room:
Removed light fixtures, curtain hardware, etc from walls, and patched the holes. Some things we were not going to remove, and I just taped over those.
I also decided that removing his large shelves and everything they contained would be far too much work, plus I have very limited space in the rest of the apartment for it all, so I just covered them in plastic, and we painted around them. I would have had to take the bed apart to move it out of the room, so that got covered and stayed, too. But it served a purpose, as I used to to put all my tools and junk on.
More wall repair and covered, taped shelves.
Then, we painted the ceiling and covered everything else with primer.
Next we painted the walls in a lovely sage green, and the doors and trim in white. (Not shown.)
The finished room:
As you can see, in addition to the new quilt, we've also added new curtains and new light fixtures. The dresser is different from the 'before' pictures too, but this is something we aquired a few years ago, it is not new now. We also finally hung his Star Wars autographed pictures from Dragon*Con, and the State Quarters map which was a gift from his grandparents.
We worked hard together on this room, and we're both very happy with the results. It's a teenager's room, now!
