Blythe's Room Before and After

For practically years now, Blythe has been pestering me to repaint her room.  She has outgrown the pink we painted when we moved in and she was three and a half, and she's wanted something bolder.  I've put her off for a long time with the excuse that we were going to reconfigure our bathroom and enlarge her room, so there was no point in repainting when we were going to move walls.

The thing is, with our current financial situation, we can't be doing a major remodel of the upstairs, paint is a cheap way to update the look of a space, and there was no reason to wait any longer.  Knowing that Mikayla is going to have twins at the end of January gave me additional impetus to get with it.

I knew Blythe needed new bedding to go with the new paint, and I found her a darling bedspread at Pottery Barn.  I got pillow shams, sheets, a cute throw pillow, and new curtains to complete the look, and then, when it all arrived, we went and selected paint.  Blythe wanted teal, and had previously made some very dark and bold color choices.  We settled on a blue that is bright but not too overpowering, and I set about painting, doing a primer over the pink as I didn't want it to bleed through the blue paint.  The prep work is always the worst part and it took a couple of days, especially as I had to remove bubbled paint around one of her windows because of terrible installation and water leakage.  Kent helped me with one of the coats, and my mom helped with taping and and primer.

Blythe was thrilled to arrive home one to find me finishing up the priming and quickly changed into a painting t-shirt so she could help.  She was even more excited when the next day she found the walls blue.  I have finished all the wall painting, but need to do touch up trim painting on her window ledges and on some of the baseboard.  I also need to paint around the door casing.  All in good time.  At the moment, Blythe is content with the color change, the rehanging of her pictures, and the new bedding.

Below are before and after pictures.

The curtains are the new ones.

Her old ones were light green with white polkadots.

She insisted on putting up the new ones immediately upon their arrival, 

even though I knew we were going to have to take them down almost immediately.

Whild doing the primer, I went to move a dropcloth and didn't realize that the open bucket of paint was sitting on top of the cloth which is underneath the dropcloth I thought the paint was sitting on.

It tipped over, spilling a large circle of paint onto the carpet. 

I said a bad word, several times in a row, and began frantically running around trying to figure out how to clean it up.

I'm happy to report that if you didn't know I had spilled it, you would never know. 

Maureen let me borrow her vacuum which helped do the trick.

Blythe wanted to help, of course, and worked with me to cover up the pink.

The after.  

Teal walls, new bedspread, curtains to match.

It will never, ever look like this again.