How to Furnish and Decorate Your Kid's Room On A Budget (and Have FUNDoing It!): Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of How to Furnish and Decorate Your Kid's Room On A Budget (and Have Fun Doing It!).  (Please pardon my long-winded title! :)  If you missed part one of the series, check it out here.

And now..... Here's the first amazing discovery I made on this journey of furnishing and decorating Isaac's big-boy room:  SPRAY PAINT.  Surprised?  You can do a lot more with spray paint these days than in the past.... because this is not just any spray paint... I'm talking about RustOleum spray paint.  It is AMAZING.  I used this color blue, which I found at our local Ace Hardware store.  This stuff sticks!  To EVERYTHING.  Wood (sanded, OR NOT!), metal, even PLASTIC!  It has revolutionized my (decorating) life.  It transforms old, blah-looking furniture (and wicker baskets!) into totally cool kid-room decor.....with ZERO SANDING!  Really!  I was shocked!  Just dust your furniture first, spray on one fairly thin coat at a time (outside, of course), allow about 20 min. of dry time between coats, and at least an hour and a half or so before handling... and.... TA-DA!  I did about 3 coats total on each bookcase. Talk about low-budget transformation!  Each can is about 4 bucks, and I used about 1 & 1/2 to 2 cans per bookcase.

(I like that the amount of shelf space
gives us room to grow in terms of
toys, books, etc.) 

I also spray painted a couple of wicker baskets (also from my friends' garage sale) to create really cool accents for the room...and a few picture frames too!  (I'm not sure I'll leave the frames on the dresser... I may hang them on the wall at some point.)  It was so. incredibly. EASY!

Another Spray Painted Treasure....

Remember the old brown mirror with bronze hooks?  I removed the hooks with a screwdriver and spray painted them gray. Then I covered the glass with paper and painter's tape, and spray painted the wood frame white. Allowed it to dry for an hour or so, screwed the hooks back on, and had a really cute mirror with gray hooks.  Super easy!  But I wasn't finished with it yet....  Tune in to part 3 to see how the mirror turned out.  It's pretty sweet!

But first......



Time to share amazing discovery number 2: Scrapbook paper!  The backs of the book cases were a little beat up, so I decided to cover them with scrapbook paper.  I found the perfect scrapbook paper at Hobby Lobby" trucks, trains, rockets, airplanes... Isaac loves to look at it and talk about them. :) It looks really cool, adds to the theme of the room, and Isaac hasn't yet discovered that there are edges that could possibly be peeled.  It helps that our housemate Jerusha and I spread a thin layer of craft glue around the edges of each page, as close to the edge as possible.  The paper is glued down pretty well.  I think between both bookcases we used about 22 sheets.  Super fun, easy, and, you guessed it, a low-budget spruce-up for some inexpensive, but now pretty awesome, book cases.

**IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE**
If you put book cases, or even a dresser, in a child's room, they should ALWAYS be attached to the wall (into a stud) so it doesn't end up being pulled down on top of your child.  Just had to put that out there.

Come back tomorrow for Part 3 of "How To Furnish and Decorate Your Kid's Room On A Budget (and Have Fun Doing It!)"  

Secret:  Part 3 is my favorite part of this series....and includes "Amazing Discovery Number 3!" :)