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How To Create a Boy's Room

You're probably sick of these posts, but I can't help but feel a huge weight is off my shoulders as each room rounds the corner towards completion. So far, the family bathroom is done (needs a mirror hung and a bit of masticking still, but that's minor compared to the huge effort needed previously), Melissa's room is done (the skirting boards need touch ups), our room is done (ditto on the skirting boards and our closet is nowhere near done, hence our clothes being piled in corners) and the nursery is done (needs new closet doors).

We are so far from done it makes me ache. The entire downstairs needs floors. The massive hallway needs sanding, filling, and painting. The guest room needs painting. The en-suite, utility room, and wet room are basically empty plastered shells. The outside of the house needs painting, which has been impossible so far as it's rained every damn day. The electrics aren't finished and we have no heating (and yes, it's chilly enough to need heating) isn't ready as the pipes aren't 100% done. Our to-do list is enough to make me want to crawl back into bed with a bottle of something with a high proof number.

But now at least we can cross another one off the list (ok, it needs skirting board work, too).

Jeff has the smallest room in the house, but it was by choice. He wanted that small room, which is a single bedroom (or, as was our original intention, the most perfect size study ever) for his very own. His room was the last to get done as our piece of shit family bathroom was that room, and we needed it for a long time (for obvious reasons).

Right.

To make a boy's bedroom, first you have to rip out the piece of shit bathroom.

Then you have to remove the floor and re-do it and all the steel beams, because when this part of the house was built in the 1980's there was no reinforcement beneath it. This makes me shudder, considering the fragile floor hosted our bathtub. Often, with me in it.

This is the view from below once the floor was ripped out.

And of course you have to re-plaster the room, as there were tiles everywhere and we punched another window into the room to make it lighter.

Of course, you need a floor, right? Everyone's room needs a floor. It's one of those priorities on my list, along with macaroni and cheese and ensuring no one goes truly mental.

Then you have to sand, fill, sand, fill, paint, paint some more (in this case a grey-green color), want to kill people while painting, and install floor. Bamboo in this case. Put in a bed (helpful if you don't want the blue car coming round). Two very freaky prints Jeff was desperate for arrive shortly to go on his walls. A computer is being re-built and will be put in his room on that black computer desk in the corner as a thank you for all the imposition he's been through (he lost his original room to the babies when they were born, then he had no room for the longest time). The computer will have parental controls on it, but he doesn't need to know that. We managed to talk him out of having everything black and white, as monochrome screams 1980's bachelor pad.

And in the end you have a room that he is absolutely crazy about.

Sorry about the cramped photos. It's really quite a cozy and sweet room but impossible to photograph.

And so this is yet another milestone - our home now has a room for everyone. No one is sleeping in the guest room apart from guests. No one is sleeping on the pull-out sofabed in the hurricane-hit study. Every member of this family has a room. No one is lacking a space, no one has to feel unwanted or be exposed to instability.

We are now, officially, a five bedroom home.

-H.