I can’t believe it has been almost two weeks since we last updated everyone on the new bedroom!  Those weeks were a total whirlwind around here.  They were full of taping, sanding, coating, building, Pinning, researching, imagining, and obsessing.  I, admittedly, have been way more responsible for the aspects of the job that require me to exert very little physical energy and I have been kind enough to allow Ronan to take on almost all of the manual labor  because I only have about 8 more weeks left of using this pregnancy as an excuse to be lazy.

In all seriousness, I have been losing so much sleep over this project, but not because of the reasons I expected.  I thought that I would be freaking out about not having a nursery ready for the baby at this point.  However, the reality is that we can’t get going on the nursery until we finish this bedroom for our 4-year-old and while we could just rush through this room in order to get to the baby’s room, that doesn’t seem like the right choice.  The choice to make the new bedroom feel like a room that was always meant to be in this house seems like the responsible one and that is what we intend to do.  While we would like to hurry up this renovation and start finishing up more projects, we owe it to this old house to make the room as special as we can.  Rushing through it would be doing the house a disservice.  That said, the time for a big decision has come and we would love your help.

Check out below what we have done in the last couple of weeks.  Then, please help us decide what we will do next! (Don’t mind that my authentic self went with iphone pictures for this post.)

This is where we left off on the last post- the room had already been through a total transformation from where it had been the week before, but we still had (and have) a long way to go.

I have come to realize that when you are trying to determine how many hours a room will take to tape, you should take your original prediction and multiply it by the number of words that are in the English language.

This is a Girl Scout cookie order I found written on the drywall.  I’m fairly sure Ronan didn’t actually order almost 40 boxes of cookies and that the numbers and cookie names are actually unrelated.  I am also secretly hopeful that I am wrong.

I took this picture last Friday right before I left for work because we knew it was going to be a BIG day for those floors.

Don’t they just look like they were ready for their big makeover?  We don’t know how long they had been covered in the maroon paint, but we can assume it was a longggg time judging by how hard it was for Ronan and his friend to remove all of it.  When I was leaving for work that day, they had a big drum sander that they were ready to use. Apparently, it didn’t take too long before they realized the paint wasn’t going to go down without a fight.  They ended up sanding the whole thing with little hand sanders, but the results were sooooo worth it (easy for me to say, I know…)

Ohhhhh baby!  The polyurethane is still wet in this picture, so the floors look darker than they actually are now.

If you want to scroll up and look at the “before” from this same angle, I won’t blame you one bit. (Or you could follow us on Instagram @ahomedecided where I put them side-by-side for you!)

This view is from the hall looking into the bedroom through the left door that is going to be a closet soon and the right door which is the new entrance to the room.  If you want to see a reminder of what this view looked like a couple of weeks ago, check out the picture below!

Crazy, right?!

Here is Ronan looking a little defeated and a little ambitious at the same time.  That’s a pretty common renovation look and feeling, I think.  It’s a constant internal struggle between “we’ve got this” and “what have we gotten ourselves into?” Luckily, if we are feeling negative, we are almost always able to look around and feel good about what we have done so far.  We also remind ourselves that this project is something we dreamed of doing for years and years and we feel so lucky to have the opportunity to do it.   Also, that is the framing for the closet.  Yes, it is super tall!  The top couple of feet will be turned into a little nook for storage.

This view is looking from the hall, through the little area that will be the vacuum’s home  linen closet and into the bedroom closet.

I have big plans for the layout of this closet and Pinterest and Instagram are both to blame for that. #closetgoals #kidsclosets #thisiswhyIdontsleep

The First Vote in FOREVER! And it’s a big one!

It has been a longgggg time since our last vote on the blog, but it is finally time for another one.  If you read the last post, you probably got the hint that we had some ideas on how to best use all of the new space in this room.  One of those ideas included adding a loft area of some sort.  At first, we thought that a loft could go above the closet, but like most of our plans, that has since evolved into a totally different beast.  Now, if our readers decide a loft is a good choice, it will be going to the left of the entrance into the room.  (Get ready for the Photoshopping that is about to happen because it might be unlike anything you have seen since you first discovered Microsoft Paint on your 1997 desktop computer.)

That, my friends, is how the pros use Photoshop! You get the point tho.  If the decision is to build a loft in this space, it will go pretty much where that beautiful blue structure in the photo is and the bed will go under it.

Now, here is what we need your help with!  As you probably know if you are not new to the blog, our plan has always been to make this house awesome and then eventually sell it.  The kicker is that “awesome” means something different to us than it does to you.  So, while we know what we would consider “awesome” in this case, we want to know what to do based on what you would like in this room because someday a “you” will live here instead of us.  You don’t have to convince us why we would love or hate to have a loft in our own house, you just have to decide what you personally would prefer and then tell us by voting. It’s really not about us, it’s about you.

You should know that if our readers do decide that we should build the loft, we have a plan all set and are ready to build it immediately.  It will include railings high enough for little people to play safely inside of so that it works for a family with young kids.  It will also be large enough to fit a twin mattress into so that it can be used as an additional sleeping area or the only sleeping area if someone decides they don’t need a bed under it.

So, please tell us what you want!  Should we run with the loft idea or scrap it, finish this room, and get to the nursery already?  Would you prefer to buy a house with or without a loft in one of the bedrooms?  We are ready to get to work on whatever our readers decide!  Voting closes 24 hours after it starts and this post is set to go live at 6 pm Friday night, so by Saturday night, we will know what this room has in store for it!

Thanks for following our journey and helping us make these tough decisions.  We love having all of you here : )