girls’ room: part I

here it is. part one of our massive girls’ room project.

i explained way back HERE what the plan was—take two rooms and join them into one.
i even put my mad photoshop skilllzzz to use and drew you some diagrams:

BEFORE:

POTENTIAL AFTER:

i shared all my inspiration pins in THIS post.

colors and bedding and paint…we plotted and planned.

mr. googiedaddy drew plans…

 

and i drew illustrations (that literally lost perspective)

and eventually it was time to begin.

the existing doorway(s) as you come down the hallway:

 
(some construction had already begun when i took these shots, obvs)

the first step was cleaning out the existing rooms.

everything you own in a box to the left…to the left…

the dining room moved into the living room. the bedrooms moved into the dining room.

remember these shots i took of the girls?

this is where we took them:

dressers shoved in every corner, mattresses on the floor and against the wall. thank goodness for wide open apertures making fuzzy backgrounds ;)
keeping things relatively chaos free during construction was a big goal. one that got progressively harder as the week went on.

but back to the rooms…

ripping out the old beds…
BEFORE

AFTER

a bit painful. we built those beds and hand painted them many moons ago—when we only had girlies two instead of girlies four.  
but all in the name of progress (and getting the baby out of mommy and daddy’s room!)

next up: attack the wall

oddly enough—i have always had allergy issues in this room. and when jeremy pulled the sheetrock off the wall there was a tiny bit of mold on some of the studs. only on the center studs of the interior wall. (see where he ripped the sheetrock back to see if there was any on the studs of the exterior wall?) fortunately, all the moldy studs were ones being ripped out. and i’ve had no issues at all since then.

goodbye wall!

aaaannnddd...

GONE!

the closet in guinevere’s purple room, both doorways and the dividing wall—buh-bye!

all the colors hurt ma brain. ;)

day one concluded with an epic fabric buying trip. the googiedaddy and i spent TWO HOURS gathering fabrics at joann’s. we took over an entire cutting table—mixing and matching, picking and rejecting. i filled a book with ideas and sketches and plans.

in the end we bought over $150 of fabrics. eek! it was a scary moment. it was really our first “official” purchase for the project. and it was something that set the tone for the whole thing: unreturnable fabrics--concrete purchases defining the feeling and color scheme.

there was no going back. (well, i think the missing wall did that too. but for me it was really all about fabric)

side point: googiedaddy, as i’ve mentioned, is in the custom furniture business. meaning when other gals say “i need to go buy fabric” and their husbands roll their eyes and sit in the car, my hubs is all “awesome, i need to buy a new rotary cutter. let’s go!”
so when buying fabric for the girl’s room we got into an…ahem, heated discussion at the cutting table about whether or not i would cut my pillow welt on the bias or on the grain to save fabric. (vis-a-vis—he wants to do it the “right” way…and i’m cheap)

srsly. do other women have to deal with this nonsense? ;) i appealed to the employee cutting our fabrics. she just laughed at us.

so that was the end of day one. we were not super exhausted, good progress had been made, and we were in the honeymoon phase of the project.

everything was sparkly shiny happy people doing construction.

day 2 of the project was only a half day (sunday). it involved some more demo work, cleanup, and the door went in it’s new spot…

see that hole above the door? the one normally covered in sheetrock? we gots biiiiggg plans for that hole. but that’s a post for another day :)

we were still feeling good. we were still sparkly shiny happy people doing construction.

and then came…electrical (duh duh duuuuhhhhh)

there was sooo much electrical work to do. so, sooo much. each bed has it’s own light and outlet. 2 ceiling lights in new spots with new switches, a light and outlets by their dresser…i definitely have the easier part of that job. i sit on the floor with my hand in the future-electrical-thing-hole, waiting for the wire. jeremy has to go climbing up in the attic, where i imagine him swinging from rafter to rafter with electrical wire wound at his side, like some sort of tarzan/indiana jones hybrid.

i think the reality is a touch less glamorous—involving sweating and squeezing and aching muscles and sticky attic insulation. yuck.

so day three was a lot of that. we also squeezed in a massive home depot shopping trip, buying 80% of what we needed to build the bed, lighting, paint, etc. we also started laying the flooring. we have ikea laminate through the entire house, but never laid it in guinevere’s room. which was a fortunate thing—we just used up the boxes we had…and came up a box short. :(

the fun part of day 3? in order to place the outlets and lights on the beds we got to do this:

the first bit of framing for the bunk beds. yay!

this was a very, very exciting moment!

so there you have it: the first three days of construction, summed up. the shine was wearing off. we were well out of the honeymoon phase and well into the “wecandothiswecandothiswecandothis” stage.

we had become sparkly shiny happy people doing construction…with much much more to do.