Weekend project

As her reward for (finally!) keeping her room clean, we have been getting ready to redecorate Ali's room. (Jess & I spent a day and a half in there this summer and came away with 3 tall kitchen garbage bags of garbage and 6 brown paper grocery bags of books, toys & clothes to give away. The big clean up really helped inspire Ali to keep it looking nice.) Here's a before picture of Ali's room, as well as a closeup of the wallpaper border.

As you can probably guess, we have not decorated Ali's room since she was a baby. (Hey, she's the one who wouldn't keep her room clean! We've heard lots of whining over the past few years, but have held firm.)

Originally, I thought I'd get the room prepped and get the first coat of paint on the walls Friday night. (Why do I always get these crazy ideas in my head?!) OK, that wasn't happening, but surely I'd be able to get the room all ready to start painting first thing Saturday morning, right? Ha ha ha... I'd overestimated how much energy I would have left by Friday night and WAY underestimated the amount of stuff Ali had taped, thumbtacked and otherwise fastened to her walls.

Anyway, I did finally get to start actually painting Saturday afternoon. Ali wanted stripes to coordinate with her new comforter (http://www.target.com/gp/detail-tab-popup.html/ref=in_de_detail-item-display/601-3112146-2690557?ie=UTF8&parentStoreItem=0&asin=B0016A7CQ8&tabToSelect=additionalImages). Here's the sketch of what her striped walls will eventually look like:

I got the inspiration for the pattern from this blog: http://family.go.com/blog/princess_peg/painting-stripes-that-won-t-make-you-see-red--261964/. I was disappointed that she had not included dimentions for the stripes - I was left still struggling with that. So, I first planned mine making all the stripes equal to 1, 2 or 4 notebook paper lines. I divided the # of inches in my wall (140) by # of the notebook paper lines (20), so come up with stripes that were 7, 14 and 28 inches wide.

Here's Ali hard at work sanding (we had to do some spackling where there was residual glue from the original wallpaper border): Here's one of the partially completed walls:
When it's all done, Ali's room will have 1 white wall, 1 "Muted Fuschia" (pink) wall and 2 striped walls (white/pink/brown).

After an entire weekend of prepping and painting I will be so glad when we're done! Ali is SO excited about her new room, though, so it's all been worth it. She is certain that she is going to have the BEST bedroom!