Painting

I know it probably hasn't been talked about here, but we needed to paint the walls.  There was a serious graffiti problem because Creeper decided to go through a phase of putting murals all over the walls.  He roped Link and Bear into the whole thing.  As a result, we had to paint several of the rooms, pretty much all the bedrooms and the downstairs hall.

Pinkie's room was the first one we painted.  As you can tell, it's her favorite color, pink!  We wanted to do each of the rooms in something that suited the kids.  Her room needs some touch ups with a stain covering primer and a paint over, but overall it looks pretty good.

We don't plan to leave it at just pink.  We're planning on doing all of the trim in her room at some point.  Then, once that is done, we're going to be looking for some balloon stencils to go up around the border of her wall.  Then she can have a room that really looks like something inspired by Pinkie Pie.

Eventually we want to do up her room entirely in My Little Ponies.  We want to get bedding for both the bunks in My Little Pony print.  Then she can really have a pony inspired room.  For the time being she'll have some pretty bright walls.  It goes really well with her bright, white dresser.  Her room is definitely more cheery now.  Best of all she absolutely loves the color.  It suits her, and not just because she's pinkie.  Her favorite color is pink and it's a bright, cheery color   While I would call her anything but a little ray of sunshine, the color certainly boosts her mood.

The next up was the hallway.  This we decided to do in green.  Originally I imagined more of a sage color, but I wasn't the one that went to get it.  This is a bit darker than I'd thought of going, but it looks pretty nice.  I'm not disappointed in how it turned out.  It looks much better than the stark white walls.

The walls look streaky, I know, but this is when they were freshly painted before they had a chance to dry.  I did some touch ups over areas the roller didn't want to hit well, so it looks kind of streaky here.  I suppose I should have waited for it to dry.  Unfortunately, you can't really see it in natural light because the natural light is so incredibly dark in that hall.  It's also not really that dark or grass green either.  It looks pretty nice.  I like it.

The most challenging part of painting the hallway was the little alcove upstairs.  It's pretty clear the two bedrooms used to be one.  There's some weird little features to the rooms and the hallway that make that pretty obvious.  For example, the hallway has a weird doorway into it that leads to two rooms.  Two of the rooms have ridges where a wall was clearly added in.  The doorway on one room has a weird little nook where the doorway was built in.  It's all a very odd architectural thing.

After the hall was done, the next room to be tackled was Creeper and Link's room.  Their room is blue.  As much as they wanted green, we didn't want to have that much green in one room, so we did Rainbow Dash blue.  We're going to go back in later and do the trim in green, which I think they'll like.

Their room is the biggest room, and the most difficult to work with right now.  They've got a large bed in there, a bed that used to be mine.  There's no safe place to put their bunk bed in there, so when we decided to swap the rooms around, they ended up with my old bed.  After the new year we're investing some money to put two twin beds in their room in it's place.  For now they share one huge bed.

Overall I like the way their room is slowly starting to turn out.  They got this room rather than staying in the room with their bunk beds because it's the biggest room.  It just made the most sense to put the two boys in the biggest room and leave the smaller two rooms for Pinkie and Bear.  There are two of them and they need the most stuff.  We're also going to be getting at least one new dresser to go in their room, which will make it so much easier to store all of their stuff, something that would have been a challenge in their old room.

Last of all was Little Bear's room.  Originally Bear wanted Elsa Blue, but after some consideration, purple was settled on as the perfect color.  It's a little darker than I was originally thinking, but I really like it.  Again, you can see the streaks from the drying paint.  It looks pretty good though.  I think this room, out of all the rooms, we're going to have to paint over when we leave.  It's so dark the landlord won't be thrilled to paint over it, but he told us we could paint and told us just no black or nothing really dark.  This isn't even as dark as it appears in the picture.  And we can always go lighter if he really objects.  The important part is Bear is happy with the results.

Bear's room we're planning to accent with Elsa blue and perhaps paint snowflakes around the top edge of the room.  We're going to be painting the dressers blue with snowflakes as well.  That will really brighten up the room.  I'm really hoping that will make Bear's room more comfortable to be in.  Right now Bear doesn't want to be in there much, but that may change.  Best of all, it covered all the graffiti on the walls.  That was what we really needed it to do.

So now all the work is done and we're ready to move on to other things.  It seemed like a never-ending process, but it's finally taken care of.  We're all pretty happy with the results.  It's looking pretty sharp!  I think we could get used to having some color in our house.  It's so much better than stark white walls!