You’ve Made Your Bed – Now Lie in It!

Just thought I’d give an update on our progress with the day bed that my girls and I have been working on.  It’s taken a while to get this far because I’ve tried to wait for when they’re available so that they can paint too.  Today, I just said, “To heck with it!” and finished the painting.

Of course, I’m not actually totally done.  I still think the trim could use one more coat, but I was so tired of the house being torn apart that I ignored that little fact and spent the rest of the day putting the play room back together.
So, here’s what the play room looked like before we started the bed:

This messy state is pretty common for it lately.  I think something exploded in there and no one had the wherewithal to clean it up, so it just stayed that way.

Once we’d built the bed, we pulled everything out of the play room and put it into the living room (the tiiiny living room) so we could bring the bed in and paint it inside.  I thought I had a picture of the living room piled high with crap toys, but I guess I don’t. 

Suffice it to say, it was awful.  And, luckily, that’s the room you see when you walk up to our front door, so everyone who visited us got to see it.  It stayed that way for about two weeks.

As I said, today I could stand it no longer, so I went through the piles in the living room and just started throwing junk into the garbage or the give-away pile.  I did it exactly the way you’re not supposed to: I did not ask my kids’ input.  I’ve tried that before and everything ends up being so special that they can’t bear to give anything up.  Not even that broken Bart Simpson toy from McDonald’s that hasn’t seen the light of day for 6 months.

So, I did it myself while the kids played in the other room.  I came up with a large bag of garbage, a bag of recycled artwork, and a dining table laden with presents for Goodwill.
After Thing 1 came home from school, we headed to Target to get a few more of those awesome collapsible boxes.  And, of course, we had to stop by TCBY.  I mean, it was right there!

Luckily enough, Sleep Country USA’s Outlet shop was right next to TCBY, so we stopped in to get an idea of how much a decent twin mattress would cost.  As luck would have it, they had a floor model marked down quite a bit.  I asked him if he would mark it down even more.  He would.  So we bought it!  One more thing off my list!

When we got home, we dumped the remaining toys into our new bins, moved around the furniture several times, and jumped for joy.  (Literally, you would not believe how excited the girls are for their “new” play room".)
So, after all that, here’s the current state of the play room:

This room is pretty small, so I can’t get much of it in any one shot, plus this is the only corner that is currently presentable, but look how everything has a place!  Isn’t it beautiful?

Here’s a close(er)-up of our handiwork:

I’ve still got many things to do in this room (including labeling all the boxes and hanging frames on the big wall to hold kid art), but having our front room free of toys is a wonderful thing.  I am content.