The BIg Pink, Revisited

It's been a year and a half since I shared the re-do of my daughter Lily's bedroom.  In the original post, I wrote about how it all evolved, and also about the (many) things I don't love about the room.

Fast forward to this spring, and my irritation with the general look and feel of the room hadn't changed.  In fact it was worse, because now the room was thoroughly lived in and thoroughly messy and more, it was clear that Lily couldn't hang out in the room with her friends because there wasn't anyplace to sit. 

Around this time, in my despair to find a way to rearrange a room that just can't be very rearranged, I remembered the little orange futon that used to live in the playroom. After rearranging the playroom/guestroom, the futon was living out in the garage, waiting for me to put it up for sale on Craigslist.

One Saturday afternoon when I went in to dust and straighten the bedroom, I got completely fed up and started hurling piles of crap out into the hall and getting that "thousand mile decorator's stare" as I leaned in the doorframe and started cooking up a plan.

Within the hour, I had the husband hauling that heavy orange futon out of the garage and up the staircase. (I have such a nice husband. Have I mentioned that?)  Anyway.

Before:

And After:

I rearranged the room and later that weekend, hung up the shelves (that used to live in my entryway).  I'd been promising to do that forever, and Lily and I were both glad that I finally came through.  It allows her to display her Josef birthday doll collection (note that they stop at 9 -- because she didn't have any display space, they didn't get purchased these last 2 birthdays).  It also lets her display the "potion" crafts that were a big part of her summer.

So her room was completely rearranged, but still needed a good sorting and re-organization of so much clutter. But then summer hit and the kids were out of school, and so for the entire summer her room was merely different, but still not really done (or cleaned). 

Now they're back in school, and this week I've been cleaning and cleaning and throwing things out and helping to find better storage and organization options for her.

She's been a Japanese manga and chibi drawing fool lately, which is cute, but also means that her desk (and the surrounding floor) have been littered with papers in various stages of creation.  Since she's in middle school now, and since she's starting to do her homework alone in her room, we needed to clean up the chaos and make it a better space for studying along with the creativity.

The drawers are cleaned out, the crayons and markers are sorted and contained, and I bought her the pink paper organizer at Ikea this weekend. 

Her vanity area is now next to the door, and the surface was also a big cluttered mess of lip gloss, earrings, Harry Potter wands, marbles, papers, etc.  And she'd stopped wearing most of her earrings, because they were lost in her equally cluttered little jewelry box.

I bought the earring tree at Michael's, and she loves it, and loves that I found & sorted her earrings.  Let's see how well she can keep up with actually using it!

 Some cheap purple Command hooks serve to display her soccer medals and Disney pin lanyard. I want to buy some nicer, real hooks to install to the left of the mirror for necklaces and scarves. So far I haven't found anything I like, but  a trip to Anthropologie would probably solve that. 

The futon has just enough room under there to fold out into a full sized bed, once you move out the little table. We've used it for a sleepover, and it worked out great. (In the old version of the room, there was no space to sleep on the floor.)

While I'm still a long way from loving this room, I like it a lot more now that its more functional. Lily is able to invite friends into her room and have a place to actually sit and hang out.  This is a small room already, and it's packed full of furniture -- but every piece serves a function

The fact that she still prefers to crawl into my bed on lazy weekend mornings to sit and read gives me hope: it tells me that in a couple years, she'll likely get tired of exotic loft-sleeping, and want a regular bed again.  Already, she has to duck down to get into the bed, and she certainly can't sit up in it.  She's mentioned wanting a chandelier -- until I reminded her that she can't have any hanging fixtures while the loft is up. 

I'll be more than happy to oblige when that time comes. Until then, she's an eleven-year-old girl who still feels that she has a pretty awesome bedroom, no matter what mom thinks.

And mom just thinks she's a pretty awesome kid. 

You can see all the bedroom Before shots in my original post about her bedroom, here.

Linking up with Jules for the William Morris Project.