I IKEAed the hell out of that room.

Whoop whoop. Merry Christmas and all that jazz.

Go 'head and laugh. Isn't this just so tender vittles? The family business. Awwwww. (Not sure why I look scared-ish. Look at all those fiveheads!)Oh, but hey, we went to see Avatar opening day. Loved it! The effects, that is. Fun time with the fam.
But before that, I decided it would be a good idea to rip my entire house apart right before the holidays. I thought Let's paint. Let's tear up carpet. Let's put a new kitchen counter top in and swap bedrooms around. We can pile garbage and debris 4 feet high on the porch in front of the door. Let us grossly underestimate the amount of time everything will take and make our house barely liveable for a few days. Yes, now is a good time to do these things.

I'm kind of exagerating (who me,) but not much. And as always, I don't have true before and after shots to illustrate the makeover-ness of it all. So picture the entire room that sickly flesh color shown inside the closets. The closets we left unpainted because we were at the end of our painting rope.

Also picture the most dastardly, wickedly ugly striped! (in shades of crap) carpet and you're halfway to imagining the Before. This was my bedroom (well, Mark's, too,) but now it's Sam's. He selected the wall color. It's very soothing.

This is the girls room pre-carpet. Aggie picked out the wall colors. I was a little scared about the colors, but I like them ok now. This room had pinky pink walls and a turquoise piece of carpet which didn't fit the room. It was super nice of the previous owner to leave it behind for us. I just covered that square hole they cut in the carpet with an equally ugly area rug. Way pretty! The girls even helped paint a little, which is a test of patience after spending all day prepping the room, let me tell you.

Not sure if you can read this: but Mark, ever the role model, painted "Aggie Stinks" on our newspaper window blinds.

"So-in-so Stinks" is like our own family grafitti. I don't get involved too often, but it's not uncommon to find this sentiment scrawled on homework, the newspaper, or a scrap of paper towel left for the allegedly stinky person to find. But Aggie fixed it to say "Dad(ie) Stinks." And there it will stay until JCPenney's sweat shop (kidding!) sees fit to ship my Roman blinds.

So this is basically an after shot. I didn't stage this so well, what with the busted handles on the shabby dresser (I'm gettin' to it!) and the not quite made bed.

Sam's room didn't photograph so well either. Plus I didn't include his sweet TV/PS3/Wii setup hidden in the closet. He has revealed his inner neatnik also. He had this room whipped into shape in no time. The bed is YoYo approved as you can see. (Pile of laundry wasn't supposed to be in the photo.)

And this represents 10 lbs of $#!t in a 5lb bag.In moving our bedroom down to Sam's former room we lost about half the area and nearly all closet space. We also increased the size of our bed thereby taking up even more room.

Why do it then? Well, because this room sits right on the porch giving easy access by window to the bedroom. Usually all the kids camped out in this room. I should probably be embarassed to admit that I've let the girls sleep on the floor in Sam's room for years, but it's been going on for so long that I've grown numb to it. Eh, so sue me, right? Point being that I was way upstairs at night and all my chilluns was down in that room where someone could break right in an' snatch them.

So I've been puzzling these many years how we could create storage and a livable space in an approximately 9 foot by 9 foot room.

Enter IKEA, land of "affordable" (cheap? flimsy? nah!) furniture. We've never really invested in any good furniture to date figuring on heavy use and abuse with 3 children and a somewhat occasionally careless (no offense Darling!) man in the house.

So for our purposes IKEA works wonders. It's functional (if you're selective,) versatile, and you aren't totally heartbroken if it breaks because it didn't cost a fortune. My only beef with IKEA is that they (purposely, I swear) don't tell you everything you'll need for some projects just to force you back into that store where ohmygoshhowcuteisthatthingIdidn'tseetheotherdaywhenIwasjusthere jumps up at you and you buy something else.

Not to mention it's a good half hour away. Totally incovenient when you've unloaded a van load of boxes of unassembled furniture, had a remodelling-fueled meltdown with your husband and then sat in a teary heap on the floor after opening the very first box to find that they gave you the wrong damn colored cabinet.

But anyway, the final result is swell. I love having a small but efficient bedroom. It forced us to get rid of even more excess stuff, something I've been working on for the past year or so. Mark also bought a big honkin' tv to put on the wall. Probably horrible fung shui but awesome for watching movies in bed.

Also made a decision on the kitchen countertop. It's white with teensy black stippling (word?) dots? that give it a grey appearance. It looks like the silestone sample I was coveting but it is good old formica. I did splurge on the integrated sink though. Love it! Loved it even more when they finally delivered the damn backsplashes on Christmas Eve. Retrofitted to preserve our crazy tile backsplash. Very important.

Not the Taj Mahal, but pretty good for a formerly almost condemned 100 plus year old house!

So all this stuff meant we kept putting off getting a Christmas tree. There simply wasn't any place to put it because the living room was our stuff receptacle. We kept saying Tomorrow we'll get the tree, tomorrow but then tomorrow was Christmas and we had no more time. So thankfully we had Lily's beautiful fiber optic tree from the dollar store. Perfecto!

See that Santa's hat up there? On it is a peel of the clementine Lily left for Santa. No milk and cookies this year. Her only regret was that she forgot to leave something for the reindeer. I told her I'm sure they had plenty from all the other houses, no worries.
I think it was still a good Christmas.I even surprised Sam with his gifts. Mah Boy needs a hair cut!Mawsi is thrilled with our Christmas gift to them.Christmas breakfast brimming with pork and biscuits.

That's Fluffy Fluff Fluffbug sleeping in the crook of Lily's arm. Cat is weird!

Laughing at Lily's mechanical cockroach toy.

And now here I sit as the satellite guy installs a cable for our new tv (lot's of tv's in this post huh.) Mark, Sam, & Pops are in the mountains for the Men's Christmas Trip. Aggie's at a friend's, Lily's at her grandma's and I'm here babysitting a coondog.

Miss Jill is learning to be a house dog but she needs attended to like a toddler. It's very tiresome because I'm so out of practice! Crate training, potty training, don't leave me when I'm eating, I'm bored, Can I play with the cat?, can I eat the cat?, pet me, where's Mark?, where's the other dog?(camping with Mark,) wipe my feet when I come in from outside, whoops I peed on the porch....

I want to sit in the rocking chair, crap, I'm stuck in the rocking chair, help me off the rocking chair...Thank goodness for stuffable kong thingies. I swear to you, she just sat down beside me and farted 3 times. Fartingest dog I ever met. Husband, you owe me!!! And it snowed last night. Don't you hate when you have to go scrape your windshield and brush all the snow off your cow?

This is the view from my new bedroom. And we love it, don't we, yes, we do!