{home} Our Room.

Every room in our house has gotten love and affection, except our bedroom. The kids' rooms are adorable (if usually very "lived-in") but ours was just the place we shoved everything we didn't want company to see. Clothes, clutter, the works. So it has been looking a little sad.

The last week that Steve spent in San Antonio I was home alone with the kiddos. To keep myself busy, I tasked myself with fixing up the bedroom. I had a budget of about $150, and a couple of DIY projects to work on. It took me the entire week of naptimes and hours and hours of staying up after the kids went to bed, but I started with this before:

And got to this after about an hour before I picked Steve up from the airport:

Let's break it down. (I hope you're dancing right now.)

I snagged two euro sham filler pillows at Target for $10 a pop, and put them in $5 Ikea covers. The leaf pillow was $15 at Marshalls, the large white coverlet I already had, and the ruffle blanket at the foot of the bed was another Marshalls find-$19. The lamp bases I got for $10/ea at a garage sale last year. They're from Pottery Barn! Their shades are also from Tarjay. Curtain rod (Target) $15 (the Baileys came over to put it up because guess who has two thumbs and can't operate a power drill? This girl.) and curtains from Ikea for I think $10? I also covered the box spring with a fitted sheet, which made the bed look a lot more polished (the box spring is extra tall so it always peeks out from under the blankets). The thing that made the biggest difference was rotating the orientation of the room to put the bed in front of the window. And yes, I moved the bed myself.

Most of my time went to making this chandelier (to cover the charming bare bulb that was there before). This took up more time than anything else--hours and hours of cutting out circles, sewing them together, and stringing them. But it softens the whole room. That said... I probably wouldn't do it again. It took forever.

I got some 2x3 foam board at Michael's and blew up some wedding photos at Kinko's (just on their B&W drafting printer, which I learned about from a post on Pinterest, of course). They're high contrast and a little stripey; I like how they fill up the wall space. And how cute we look. These cost $14 total for all three. :)

Then I just cleaned, vacuumed, organized, dusted, popped some candles on the dresser and went to pick up my man. I think it was a good surprise.

Another before/after: