Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Baby: Making Room for Parents

The hardest part so far of having this baby is figuring out where to put all of our stuff so that he or she has a place to live.  During the past two weekends, my husband and I (okay mostly him) have been clearing out our green room to turn it into our office/sewing room.

The green room was dubbed the green room because of the lime green carpet that covered the floor for 4+ years we've owned this house.  It is now officially gone, and this is what we found below:
Surprise!  It's green, too!

Like most young couples and expectant parents, we are definitely on a budget so we can't afford to get the floors in this room refinished right now and I'm not a big carpet fan.  After much convincing of the husband who insisted on tallying up the cost of refinishing it ourselves, we decided to paint the floor, and I'm pleased with how it's come out.



When we redid our 2nd floor bathroom, we took out the closet from this room to make more space in the bathroom.  I came up with a pretty neat idea to re-install a closet (so it's still a bedroom for re-sale), and not cost us anything.  We found these two tall cabinets in the house when we bought it, so my husband sanded them down and painted them with some leftover paint from our fence--a great glossy white that is easy to wipe down-- and secured them to the wall using L brackets.  He even found an extra door in the basement to use for this, so he set the two cabinets to its width so that when it's finished it looks like it's always been there.  I can't wait until the door is painted so we can install it, a clothes bar, and some trim and be done!



For the walls, we used an almost full gallon of paint in a light blue we found in the basement--its origins are unknown, but I think we used it as ceiling paint in the 2nd floor bathroom.  Then the baseboards and windows were painted bright white, using more leftover paint from other house projects.


Not bad, right?  So far this renovation has cost us about $35 for floor paint ($20), and some new pulls on the cabinets ($15).  I'll probably also find a throw rug to soften it up a bit for winter, but we shouldn't go over $100 for this brand new room!

Next week, I hope to have the furniture in here and start organizing our books, materials, etc...