Our house appears much bigger than our old one story ranch, but in actual fact, it has less rooms in it.  The rooms are just larger and have higher ceilings and are separated onto two floors.  Once we finish the attic, there will be the same number of rooms I suppose, just that the attic will be our rec room instead of the basement.  All that to say that we still have 3 bedrooms at this house.  Which meant that the girls would share again.  They seem to like the arrangement and this way they share one set of toys(I don’t like toys to be stored in the living space downstairs, so each kid keeps their toys in their room) and it makes it easy to change clothes over.  They are 21 months apart, but Leah wears her clothes until they are a bit small and Evelyn takes them over when they are a bit big, so I just have to move Leah’s clothes directly into Evie’s drawers with no storing in between.

The girls’ room is a bit odd in that it has two doorways and a long skinny closet that runs the length of the room but just has a door on one end.  I would just love to see the original floorplan of the house.  We think their room has changed over time because some of the trim work is kind of patched together in places, and their closet is made of panelling on the inside; it also shares the weird angled wall at the end of the hallway, so I wonder if the configuration of their room had anything to do with the connection to the back half of the house or the cool turret/porch thing that came off the side of the house right beside where their window is.  Maybe their room was just an open space at the top of the stairs before….I enjoy thinking about these details and how people would have used the house 100 plus years ago.  

The room(like every other) had wallpaper and old, smokey carpet.  You can’t really tell in these pictures but the trim was all a really yellowy-cream colour.  We had our neices and nephews over the first weekend we had the house and they helped our kids remove a lot of the wallpaper upstairs.  Most of it came off really nicely, but the walls in this room took a bit of work, and when it was finally off, the walls weren’t in great shape.  They weren’t cracking much, they just had the odd area that needed to be patched, but they were quite bumpy and there was a layer of painted wallpaper that would have been awful to try to get off.  So I decided we would get some nice thick wallpaper and re-wallpaper the walls. Before I did that, Aaron sprayed all the trim.

He also scraped the popcorn texture off of the ceiling and we painted it with shelac primer to stop the nicotine stains from coming through, and then finished with ceiling paint.  He also put 4 potlights in.  The rooms had no overhead lights and my husband is an electrician, so I requested potlights(with led bulbs) in every single room of the house.  And he lovingly obliged.  While we were getting those sort of basic things done, I was taking a look at and ordering wallpaper.  I brought home a Waverly Kids book and brought out the girls’ quilts to find something that coordinated with them.

These were the two options I narrowed down to.  I bought the quilts from the pottery barn outlet in Michigan a while ago.  I couldn’t resist because the name of the print is “Evelyn” and they were a steal at $30 a piece, when the Canadian dollar was a bit better.  The paper on the left was almost a perfect match- it had the exact same colours and butterfly theme.  However I was instantly in love with the second paper.  It didn’t match exactly, but I’m not a huge fan of things matching exactly.  Also, wallpaper is very expensive and it was going to cost significantly more than the quilts and will probably be around longer, so I chose the paper I liked better and felt the girls would enjoy longer.  It has a wider variety of colours to pull from in the future.  I opted to use it only on one wall because it is a busy pattern and because it would have cost almost $1000 to do all four walls.  For the other 4 walls I chose a neutral grasscloth off the shelf from Lowe’s that was much less expensive.  The only issue with it was that it was not prepasted, which ended up being a pain for my mother and I.  Mom came to help me with the paper because she has had a lot of experience with it and is more particular than I am, which I thought would be an asset in this case.  We put the one wall up, and then Leah practiced with scraps on the side wall.We finished up the grasscloth another day, and then removed the carpet, and had the new carpet installed.

And now we have a fun and cozy space for the girls to enjoy.There’s still a few things I’d like to do.  If the toy shelf is going to stay in here I’d like to get some purple bins for it, but it may migrate to the attic if we tackle that project soon.  Thanks for reading and I hope you’re all enjoying this first day of summer!