Abigail’s Bedroom Makeover: The Process

This is the saga of Miss Abigail’s bedroom makeover. It doesn’t include a bedroom reveal at the end, so if you are holding out hope for a cute and sweet bedroom to ooh and ahh over at the end of this post, I’m just going to go ahead and tell you right now that that isn’t going to happen, lol. Her room still isn’t finished and it will be a while yet until it is ready to be shared. But I still wanted to go ahead and talk a bit about all of the work that we’ve been putting into her space upstairs.

In case you need a refresher, this is what her bedroom looked like right after we moved in.

As is the case with basically every single room in our house, her entire bedroom was painted over wall paper. It was peeling up off of the walls around the dormer windows and was rippling in various other places. Additionally, whoever lived here before hung pictures on almost every sq ft of wall space- and with plaster walls….well, that’s just fun.

The blue was not working for me, particularly since I have all sorts of fun decor plans for this room. So it was time to get working on it. We decided that our first wallpaper removal attempt should happen in Abigail’s room, that way if we totally jacked it all up it wouldn’t be one of the first things you see when you walked into our house. (Sorry, Abigail)

So bought a steamer($49.99 from The Home Depot. Not a bad investment at all!) and got to work on Abigail’s room.

Lucky for us, even though it was painted over, there appeared to only be one layer of paint and one layer of wallpaper. So it came up pretty easily with just the steam.

We worked together as a team, with Jim steaming and I pulling the paper down.

It typically came down in two sections. The painted over top layer would come down, then we would have to steam again and pull down the remainder of the paper.

Her room is big and it was tedious work, but we got it done fairly quickly. I started to think that this wall paper removal wasn’t so bad after all!

That is until we had to prep the walls for paint. We had to spray them with a wall paper remover and water mixture, followed by hand scraping and peeling up all of the remaining glue and wall paper pieces. Then we had to wipe it with a wet sponge and then we had to towel the wall dry.

Luckily(for me, not for them) my parents were in town so we had four extra hands to help with this work. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken us if it had just been me and Jim. Ugh.

So anyway, that took forever to do before we could finally get to painting.

The plan was white walls, so we did one coat of Kilz primer and then one coat of my trusty Benjamin Moore White Dove(that is slowly taking over my house. And I’m fine with it.)

Unfortunately, as soon as we finished, we realized that the “white” trim, doors, and built in’s in her room had instantly become….yellow? Cream? Sort of gray? Basically the worst color imaginable.

So off I went BACK to the paint store to buy more paint to paint all of the trim with(Benjamin Moore Simply White!)

I deliberated over whether to paint her doors pink, peach, or mint for a while but then I had a friend mention that she had a full sample can of the mint color they painted their baby girl’s nursery that she’d be happy to give me. So, free mint doors it is!

We made sure Abigail got in on the bedroom reno action. Though, looking at the amount of touch up work I have to do on that wall now I’m not sure it was my greatest idea ever.

Naturally, Mabel just sat and played. That’s what Mabel does best!

I like maniacal and Jim looks like there is something wrong with him. So, there’s that.

For the week or so we were working on her room, we had Abigail’s bed set up in ours. So her “quiet time” was spent in our room. And apparently our bedroom has magical sleeping powers because it knocked her out cold almost every day.

The mess. And, also, the warm and welcoming sleeping quarters my brother and sister in law got to sleep in over Easter weekend.

But, finally! After days and days of chaos, we were able to move everything out of her room. We installed blinds for her- we removed the half shutter things on her windows, and then mopped her floor by hand.

Once we did that we were able to move all of her things back in and start decorating!

The things we have left to do in here are:

• install a ceiling fan
• touch up paint
• make some wall art
• put together a gallery wall.

Otherwise, it is almost done. Yay!

And now I have my room(and bed) back to myself.