Final Home Before & After: Bedrooms

Before I do a big reveal of the new place, I wanted to finish off the before & after series from the old (sniff! sniff!) house.  Somewhere in the chaos of the last few weeks I realized that I hadn't done the show & tell for the bedrooms yet.  So I'm going to make you wait (bwa ha haa) while I satisfy my unaccountable need to finish one thing before starting another.

I had a hard time finding good "before" pictures.  One doesn't usually go around just taking random pictures of one's bedrooms, you know?  Here's a taste of what it was like, though.

Master Bedroom

 Before

Okay, I admit, this tells you very little about the actual bedroom.  But look how cute Andy is!

Ahem.  Anyway, please note the random storage boxes on the floor in the background, and the white metal rack just full of... stuff.

After Staging

oooooo... breakfast in bed, anyone?  (all that food was fake, btw)

that vanity made such a good changing table!  (do you see the diaper pail which we tried, unsuccessfully, to hide?)

 The Real After

ahhh.  This really was a delightful room.  Very bright.  We actually only just bought that bed frame this year, can you believe it?  Craig's List is my new best friend.

 You can see the creaminess of the new paint.  WAY better than scratched-up, dulled white.

speaking of brightness... because we removed our sad, sad fleece curtains for staging, and took a while to replace them with blinds, we had to move the baby's bed into a darker area for naptimes.

The Bathroom

Our upstairs had one bathroom.  It had two doors: one from the hallway, one from the master bed, to the right of the vanity counter.  I couldn't find any good "before" pictures, and honestly, it's a bathroom, so there wasn't too much we did there except clear the shelves and hide everything in the linen closet.

The funny story about this picture, however, is that the morning of the photo shoot, half the outlets upstairs and all the lights in the bathroom just... stopped working.  The fuse had blown, and refused to be switched back on.  So our "shazam" picture of the bathroom, which has no windows, was taken without the benefit of any artificial lighting:

thank goodness for tripods!

A good friend who's an electrician suggested we check the outlets upstairs for any damage.  I remembered accidentally dropping one of the boys' beds on top of one of the floor outlets (in our townhome, there were no outlets in the walls shared with the neighboring house, so we had two outlets in the floor -- one in the dining room and one in the boys' room).  So Mr. Pickles opened the outlet up, aaaand... a wire had melted and fused and look horrible and creepy.  Once he replaced the socket, everything worked fine.  Thank goodness for automatically tripping fuses!

The Real After

with lights! and freshly painted ceiling -- Mr. Pickles had scraped off the peeling popcorn ceiling months and months ago, and primed it, but hadn't finished painting until the week before the Open House.  Oh. my. goodness. did that paint smell!  I am so grateful for low-odor paint!

We didn't paint the kids' rooms -- we figured why bother, since they're going to be repainted by the new owners anyway, and heck, they're kid rooms!  Of course they're a little beaten up!  Who cares!  When we first moved in, what became the girls' room was a bright electric blue, and the boys' room was yellow with an ancient shag carpet.  We used both as storage until we needed them for bedrooms.

The Girls' Room


Again with the lousy "before":

you get the general idea: mess.

After Staging

ahhhh. (the "staging team" -- which was our realtor and her family -- put these plastic cones under the girls' bed to raise it up off the floor so it looked a little less ghetto)

 The Real After

back to mess... but still, less cluttered.  Katie actually enjoyed keeping their room tidy.

a place for everything....

The Boys' Room

Before 

This room was crammed.  Jojo's bed takes up a lot of space.  You can see a corner of Daniel's bed in the lower right -- he was practically against the closet doors.

This is actually from over a year ago, before we put the frames in the boys' room.  I only included it because CUTE!

  After Staging

of COURSE the decals picked that week to start falling off the walls!

 The (mostly) Real After

I should have left Joseph's bed out for display -- we had him on an air mattress for a month, so we could roll it up and hide it in case someone needed to come over.  His pillow and doggy are there in the corner though.  His bed actually was against the closet doors, so whenever he rolled over we heard this loud metallic banging coming from their room.

So there you have it!  It's weird to think that's all gone now.  The last few days before the move were very bittersweet. 

And the new owners have already repainted.

But what really made us feel "moved out" was when Mr. Pickles cut the jump rope out of the dogwood tree.  Then we really knew we didn't live there anymore.

sigh... so long, Gurkehaus!  You were good to us.