A Room for Dash

August 20, 2014 By Kelle

We finished another round of musical rooms, putting the girls together in a shared room and transforming Lainey’s old room for Dash. The room was originally a dining room that we hardly used, so we closed it off to create another bedroom and filled it with furniture that had been given to us. It worked great for Lainey for a while, but the room felt very cramped with large furniture and a wall-hogging daybed. My goal in using this space for Dash was to pare down the furniture, leaving open space for play and to make a room that could easily be kept clean with a place for everything (and if there’s not a place for it–we don’t need it). And, of course, I wanted a room that felt happy and playful with interesting and meaningful details. Since the room lacks shelves to highlight keepsakes, we utilized the walls for art and interest.

I love freshening kids’ spaces, and whether our kid room makeovers have been to welcome a baby (“We’re not putting any more walls up in our house, lest you get any ideas,” Brett has warned me.) or to switch things up, we’ve used a lot of things we already have when doing room makeovers, adding inexpensive changes with thrift shop finds and elbow grease when possible.

The old room:

Freshened up:

The biggest change to the room came from the brick wallpaper we added, a thick textured wallpaper we found from Total Wall Covering after a lot of research on brick wallpaper. I love what it did to the room.

A little Northern Michigan love–M22 sign from M22.com

I found the table in Dash’s room at Goodwill, but it was a kids’ patio table with slats on the top and an open umbrella hole. I bought a spruce board from Lowe’s, big enough to cover the table top, and Brett cut it down and sanded the edges and corners. It’s white on one side if we want to flip it over, and I painted a road scene on the facing side to create a play table for cars. We started a Plan Toys City collection for him when he was tiny and are slowly adding to it with birthdays and holidays. I love the quality, size and selection of these road toys.

All the cars and street toys store nicely in a crate for easy clean-up.

Pillow, Passive Juice Motel

Wood bird: Little Alouette, Knit Fox: Sweet Bauer Knits, Floating Bookshelf: Land of Nod

We already had most of the wall art above his dresser, pulled from his old room, but I love the new Honey Eater print in his room, a gift from Michael McConnell, artist behind Pooping Rabbit. I’ve admired his work and family for a while now and am so happy to have a bit of his talent on our walls.