One Room at a Time

I'm working on making the house feel more homey, and wanted to start with the kids' room. Decorating is definitely at or near the bottom of our life priority list, and we can live in a house with an ugly bathroom floor for a long time. But I feel like the boys room should look nice. For those readers who never saw our Boston house, I have to say, the boys' room was the highlight. Andy's mom did an amazing custom paint job to match the wendy belissimo bumblebee nursery set that I just fell in love with when I was pregnant with Owen. To this day, the thought of the new owners of the house painting over my nursery makes my heart ache and I prefer to delude myself by thinking that the 50-something lesbian couple that bought it were just so charmed by the nursery that they kept it just the way it was. Don't burst my bubble, friends, ok?

I'm not nearly as talented when it comes to painting and decorating, and sadly, the kids are really pushing too old for a baby nursery theme (although, had we stayed in our old house I probably would have kept them in the bumblebee room until they were 10 and 8. In retrospect, it's probably for the best that we left....) My lovely friend Jenna bought me an adorable package of transportation decals, so I broke out a level and a yardstick and made a line of them chugging around the walls of their room:

I used the royal blue curtains from our old dining room, and found a royal blue rug at home depot for $30, and I think that just those three things together (decals, rug, curtains) made the room look much more cozy. My mom had picked up a matching pair of multicolored striped blankets at Marshalls and gave them to me in the event I ever decided to change from pastels to primary colors, which came in handy:

Andy's mom had made wall decorations spelling the boys' names out of wood and painted them in a light green gingham-esque check to match the original nursery, and she's offered to repaint them in a royal blue and bright red, which I will take her up on. I think that once I put up those, the room will have a nice, finished look, good for the kids for a long while (I don't think Owen will be too cool for trucks until he's at least 8, do you?) but not too overdone. I'd love to paint the room, because I hate the bright white, but as you can see in the first picture the walls in all the bedrooms are textured, which the man at home depot advised me looks weird painted any color but white. So I think we might need to live with the white. Anyway, I feel good enough about this room to move one. One room down, 7 to go.