Claire's New Room: After Pictures

...and here is Claire's new room! (See previous post for before pictures). She loves it and adjusted very well to the move.

Nick painted the walls, and my mom hemmed the curtains and covered the little table shown here.

All of the furniture in the room was free: hand-me-downs from our wonderful family and friends!

The desk was Nick's childhood desk, built by his grandfather.

My mom transformed a thrift store CD storage container into a super-cute dollhouse.

Nick's talented sister, Danielle, made these collages featuring old pictures of Nick's grandmother.

A close-up of one of Danielle's pieces. I bought several mismatched wooden frames from Goodwill and painted them yellow (another project my mom helped with!).

Nick's other sister, Elise, created this piece of art. We're lucky to have such a talented family!

Claire's New Room: Before Pictures

The layout of our house is funny: two bedrooms upstairs, and two bedrooms downstairs. It makes sense to keep the new baby's nursery upstairs, next to the master bedroom, and move Claire into one of the downstairs bedrooms. Here's the problem: we do not have any kind of basement or storage room, and we park two cars in our two-car garage (yes, I'm being generous calling Nick's '69 Jeep project a "car"), so where do we store our random junk?

Until recently, it was all piled in "The Room We Do Not Speak Of". We kept the door closed.

Random tools and Goodwill donation piles...

A graveyard of broken computer parts...

College textbooks, empty boxes...

This is not even the room at its worst! You're seeing pictures taken after we sold a foosball table and exercise bike (thank you Craigslist!).

You know, one of the things that I love about Nick is his interest in a wide variety of hobbies and talents. Unfortunately, he tends to choose activities that require a lot of stuff: model airplanes, scuba diving, woodworking, building computers, etc. We managed to keep all of the things that were important to him in other, more organized, areas of our home, while donating, selling, and trashing a whole bunch of other stuff.

Stay tuned for the AFTER pictures!