For Chris's 30
th birthday, my neighbor convinced me to "remodel" our room. Our room has always been the junk room of the house! I hated our furniture and so I never even tried to make the room nice or clean. It was the one room of the house I could ignore! We are waiting to buy new furniture until we buy a house so that we can buy what fits in the room and won't have to move it multiple times (at least for a while anyway)!
The remodel was a surprise, so we completed the transformation in about 8 hours. Well, we painted the night before, so Chris knew about that, but he had no idea about the rest of the room until he came home!
So, we redecorated the room and did it all for about $200. Not bad! Most of it can be reused when we move and get new furniture, so it wasn't a waste at all! Every day that I have woken up in the newly clean and pretty room, I feel so relaxed. I just love the new look! It's not perfect, but it's 100 times better than what we had before!
My favorite part of the remodel is this picture. This is not the best photo of it, but it's good enough! We bought this print in Italy more than 2 years ago for about $10 from a street vendor. It has traveled with us from Italy to Houston, to our first apartment at Stanford, to our second apartment at Stanford, and to our current home. It has been rolled up and smashed so many times. Once, I thought I'd lost it but found it behind the dryer! Chris tried to throw it away at almost every move. He said we'd never do anything with it!
Well, I bought this open frame at Michael's for $40. Then, we bought some glass at Lowe's for $6.50 (Michael's said the glass would cost $44.00, but they would frame it for free. How kind of them to offer such a great deal???). In the end, I decided not to use the glass anyway because the picture has a little texture, and the glass took away from the look. To frame it, I placed some cardboard behind the picture, and used nails to secure the cardboard and pic. It looks great with our bedding!
We received the bedding as a wedding gift but have rarely used it because I never felt that our room was nice enough for it! I bought the curtains and curtain rods from Ross for a very good deal.
The pics above the bed were a recent addition. I just put them up there for fun as they were leftover from Chris's party. He wouldn't let me put them up for the party, so I put them up in our room. Before that, the walls were bare!
My neighbor and I painted the furniture, and she bought new drawer pulls from Home Depot for about $25.
We bought one extra curtain panel and cut it in half. Then, we laid it across the night stands to pull the room together even more.
Notice Chris's "
manimal" trophy. Something silly his friends did... Lots of manly competitions and somehow Chris won first place overall. I know you're
surprised he won because Chris is really not competitive at all! (note the sarcasm there!) His friends made this trophy and engraved his name on it. Now we use it for clean, mismatched socks - seems like an appropriate use for a manly trophy! It
didnt fit with the new theme of the room, so we moved it to the closet!
The new picture above Chris's dresser is a drawing of an outdoor Italian restaurant. Chris loves restaurants, Italian food, and Italy!
