Mia's Room - Phase One

We didn't paint Mia's room before she was born because we hadn't decided what we were going to do yet.  If she had been a boy, we were going to keep our third bedroom as an office/guest room and let the baby share a room with Michael.  

By the time Mia was two months old, it was starting to feel pretty crowded in our bedroom.  So John spent a lot of time over his Christmas break getting Mia's new room ready.  The weekend after Christmas, we tore the house apart.  We had mattresses in hallways, clothes strewn about, and furniture in random places.  We moved our computer into our formal living room.  I was a little hesitant at first, but I really like the end result.  It's a cozy place to hang out and we use that space a lot more than we used to.  I didn't take a before picture, but the piano moved to where the couch was and the computer desk (given to us by Mark & Sarah) took the place of the piano.  Until recently, if we told Michael that something was in the office he would respond, "Which office?" and we'd have to say the new or the old one.  He's finally started calling the old one Mia's room.

We moved the guest bed to Michael's room.  He had no trouble transitioning into a bigger bed.  I think he even started to sleep better once he had a "real" mattress.  That crib mattress was just so hard.  He has fallen out of bed a couple of times, but was more scared than hurt.  I didn't have any luck finding a bedspread that complimented his pastel/Yellow Submarine walls, so we just kept what we had on the bed.  Not necessarily ideal, but I figure it's not that big of a deal.  He has a little less room to play, but it's not like he was ever confined to playing in his room anyway.  I really like that all four of us can lay together for Michael's bedtime stories and prayers.  It's a nice place for some family time at the end of the day.

We also moved the armoire that was in the formal living room into Michael's room.  John had refinished it and fixed it up a few years ago.  He just made it a little more functional by installing shelves in it.  Now, it easily houses all of the clothes that had been in Michael's dresser.  It was John's great-grandpa's, so it's nice to have it and to be able to put it to good use as well.  

The next step was to paint the office to make it a little girly for Miss Mia.  John painted the entire room a tan color to replace the brown.  They are similar colors, I know, but it needed some cleaning up anyway, so we decided to lighten the paint color a little.

  I knew that I had wanted her room to have a theme wasn't terribly girly.  I wanted it to be something hippie like love and peace.  I eventually decided on birds and owls (honestly not realizing at the time how popular that had become).  I found a picture on Etsy that I really loved, so I drew a very similar version to paint above her crib.  I looked and looked for a picture of a tree to paint.  I found several that I liked different aspects of, but not the perfect one.  So I drew my own, using ideas that I had seen on others.  I traced my drawings onto transparencies, and we projected them onto the walls.  We traced the drawings in pencil.

When choosing colors for her room, we knew that we wanted to use bold colors.  We used this bow and ribbon holder that my friend Jill had made for Mia for Christmas as inspiration.  

We spent several hours at Hobby Lobby finding paints and accent items for the room.  The brown that we used for the tree and branches was leftover from the paint John used on our kitchen cabinets. 

We moved the crib and dresser that Michael had used along with a blue chair from my grandma's house into Mia's room.  We used gift cards from John's family in St. Louis and my coworkers to buy several items from Target.  I was a little nervous because we bought all of it online and it wasn't sold as a set, so it was hard to be sure if it was all going to go together well.  We got a rug, lamp, curtains, a hamper, and a couple of canvases.  I was so pleased to see how good it looked!  (You'll see them in the pictures of the finished room.)


John was on spring break this last week, so he spent a day building her a bookshelf.  He and Michael just left to buy paint for it.  We're planning on painting it white with pink interior.  We'll put it by the door and move the chair by the window. 

Here's the rest of our to-do list to finish this project:


- Relocate the stuff that's in her closet.  It's still mostly stuff from when it was our office.
- Get her a toy box or other kind of toy storage.
- paint and hang the shelf and birdhouse that we got from Hobby Lobby - I started on this stuff yesterday
- install the pink plate for the light switch
- I have aspirations to make something to hang over her dresser.  

Finding time is always an issue, but I think we'll get it totally finished before summer is over.  Summer of 2012, that is ;)  I'll be sure to post pictures of the finished project.