Autumn asks: How do you do a kids room on a budget?

Moving around so much has one advantage...the kids barely have time to get tired of the way their room is decorated! So they do get to change things up every few years. But, money is always rather short during a move (geeesshh the expenses of a move!!). We have to get rather creative in order to pull off a room that the kids will like and not look like the Goodwill project it usually is! LOL!

So today I am sharing Mighty Mouses room. Hers is a little different than any of the other ones we have done because we brought home these incredible watercolor folk paintings from China. The colors are so cool! I have a bunch for all over the house as they cost about $5 (but we won't discuss what it costs to have them framed!!).

MM didn't have her own room in Nebraska. She went straight into Songbirds room as we were in a 3 bedroom house, and with her coming out of an orphanage I didn't want to stick her somewhere alone.

When we moved to Texas we bought a house with enough rooms for everyone. Now I had the chance to do MM's room and wanted to use the Chinese art before she got old enough to want to decorate herself and make me take them down - LOL! But then I had a dilemma...what color can I paint the walls to go with all these colors???? (Note: half of her artwork is professionally frames and half is just poster board for matts with an album/scrapbook $5 frame.)



So, armed with pictures I searched high and low and collected at least a million paint chips/cards to try and figure it out. The reds and blues were very masculine. Black - no. Yellow - I really, really can't stand yellow (that was the color my mom decorated our room in when I was growing up...I got sick of it). Maybe the purple?

In the end we ended up with .... ORANGE. EEEWwwww! I don't really like orange. Okay, I don't hate orange (like yellow), but orange??? It's a very light, creamy orange, but I went ahead and bought the paint knowing I could just paint over it. Live a little! Give it a try!

And it worked.


Okay, the color isn't exact on the computer screen...but as you can see, it is a very very light orange. I call it orange cream. And no, the lady bug is not Chinese. I picked it up in San Antonio last month on our Seaworld trip...isn't it cute?

Back to the room. Now I had to figure out bedding and curtains. With orange. Think that is easy? Sure, if I was going to spend some big money I could have gone with an Indian Silk set or something, but otherwise there wasn't a lot of orange out there when I was looking. So I called in the expert....my mom.

We searched high and low. We gave up. So my mother says why don't we make a bedspread?
"You can do that?"
"Didn't I make Songbird and both her cousins crib sets?"
"Why yes, you did."

Of course in this little town there are only 2 real sewing shops as I know them. Joannes and the other one (why is the name slipping my mind) that was going out of business. And we took our paint sample and found something in the clearance stuff! Again, not something I would have ever looked for. And grandma made a two-sided bedspread that can be used either way.


Then, on our long girl vacation I took the scraps to grandma and we finally finished it all out by making a valance. I had ordered a shelf/curtain rod for the kitchen and when it came in it was orange!! I was supposed to be oak colored! It was soooo not! So I painted it and put it in MM's room. I'll use the same paint, watered down to make a wash, on the dresser I just moved out of Bones old room and put into hers. Yet another project.

And that is the story of MM's room. I'm not going to give a total shot as I just rearranged everything and all the artwork needs to be rehung to new heights and fixed to look balanced.

She'll make me change it when we move from here. Her favorite color is purple...so I'm sure we will have a very purple princess room.

Next I'll show you a fun teen room. All HER doing. She calls it the Cherry Limeaide room.