Room Makeover on a Budget

One day, a 9 year old boy decided he wanted a room makeover for his birthday.

His room was rather dull; a hodgepodge of collections that really had no connecting theme.

Since a typical birthday gift expenditure was $60, mother got busy looking for deals and planning.

She started by painting the boy’s room gray over Thanksgiving break. The paint cost was not counted in the budget.

The day arrived and this boy turned 10.

He got ready for school and anxiously awaited his return home to his new room. All day long he thought of what would transpire at home during the day around a fat quarter of some fabulous Michael Miller fabric.

The mother had been busy for weeks and was ready to reveal.

Mother made ladder rung covers for the boy’s bunk bed to prevent his feet from being uncomfortable while climbing up and down.

And curtains. Mom dyed the old muslin curtains gray, cut off yucky tab tops, added grommets (that were sitting in her stash for a year because she couldn’t use them for the project she purchased them for) and sewed in some of the guitar fabric.  Because of poor planning, the mother also had to switch out the curtain rods from her bedroom with the boy’s because his wouldn’t fit in the grommets.

The metal shelves on the wall came from a stash in the garage that the father got at Menards about a year ago for $1 or something because they were offered on rebate, and the father cannot pass up a rebate at his favorite store.

Lucky for the boy. Lucky for the mother.

During the weeks leading up to the boy’s December birthday, the mother scoured the clearance racks at every Target she visited in the hopes of finding useful items that were inspiring, if not cheap.

One day, the mother scored HUGE with 4 plastic tumblers in the perfect blues and greens for $0.48, four perfectly coordinating pillows for $3.74 each and a chalkboard guitar wall decal for $3.74. The mother could barely fit her baby in the cart that day, but she persevered dangling a baby and a pillow precariously on the way to the checkout.

The mother said to the father, “I have these tumblers that need a shelf. Please help me.” The father, always a willing participant in the mother’s ideas, took the mother’s uninspired idea and made it his own from scraps of wood in the garage.

The mother placed the bold striped Target pillows in the back row alternating with some square green hued pillows she dug out of the garage sale pile in the basement. She added some rectangular pillows for the middle row that came from the clearance rack at JCPenny for $5.97. She found them when she should have been watching her baby take 15 sheet sets out of the cubby nearby.

The mother desperately wanted to make a guitar pillow for the boy because it would, she felt, be the highlight of the room. She purchased two half yards of fabric ($9) and a bag of stuffing ($4.50), and being the geek that she is, she applied some mad math skills to make the 3 inch guitar on the fabric life-sized. While the boy was thrilled, the mother was more.

The gray comforter was in the closet and left on the “wrong” side. Though the “right” side has the perfect colors for the room, the mother thought it too busy.

The mother searched high and low for a new comforter for the high bunk, but it could not be eeked out of the budget. Instead, she found a fabric shower curtain on clearance at Bed, Bath and Beyond which she turned into a keyboard cover and other things ($8.47).

The mother finished the room 30 minutes before the boy arrived. She was tingly with excitement at what the boy’s reaction would be.

Precisely at 3:55 that day, the boy arrived and visited his room.

The boy was pleased.

As was the mother.