This is the before pic of my step son, Tre's, room.  To be honest, I was quite proud of this space when I took this pic.  Tre had been gone for the weekend at his mom's house so I took the opportunity to go in there and clean it up properly.  You know how kids are about cleaning their rooms.  They tend to clean it just enough for us to give in and be satisfied in the moment, but it's never really clean until we get our hands on it ourselves.  Isn't it cute?  It's his baby/little kid room and even though I'm only a step mom, it hurts my heart a little that we are moving on from it.  Growing up is hard for parents, too.  In actuality I think that the clean room was the catalyst for everything that happened after.  Once it was cleaned, there was space to determine what was and wasn't working still. What definitely wasn't working was the twin size bed.  Tre is 12 and will turn the ripe old age of 13 in April.  I'm not crying, you're crying!  He is super tall for his age (like 5'6" now!) and his twin bed just wasn't cutting it for him anymore. His father therefore decided it was time to clear out this tiny room and make space for the biggest bed that we could fit, a full size.  Neil and Tre spent a day cleaning out the room and it became abundantly apparent that not all of the conventional furniture was going to fit in the room once the full sized bed was put in.  Enter Neil's genius idea, a bed with drawers!  We could now eliminate his dresser, which unfortunately is not pictured, but was situated directly across from his twin bed right beside his desk.  Neil therefore made a trek to Ikea and picked up Tre's brand new teenager bed with drawers.  Now I had been thinking about repainting the room for a while.  It had been this blue shade since Tre was a baby and it just needed to be freshened up.  What better time to paint than when all of the furniture is moved out? This is when the room makeover began to really take shape.


As you can see above, Tre picked the greyish green color Retreat by Sherwin Williams.  A little advice about paint...  Always get the best paint that you can afford.  Because I've had bad experience with other paint brands in the past, I usually always buy the most expensive version of Sherwin Williams I can find because I can count on it and know it will go on well and will wear well. However, on my trip down to Lowes (they now have SW there) on this one fateful day, I was informed by the nice man in the paint department that another brand of paint (that I will not mention, but it starts with a V), which is less expensive, is actually made by Sherwin Williams and would therefore be just as good.  It was not.  I had to put up three coats before I decided that we needed another coat and that it needed to be actual Sherwin Williams paint for the final round.  The other brand would just not match up between the cutting in along the edges and the roller painting and I didn't want to waste any more time with it.  To the store I went (actually, I think it was Neil) to grab another gallon of paint, expensive Sherwin Williams paint this time.  Apparently, I had to learn the lesson I already knew about paint quality all over again.  

Also, a little advice about working with 12-year-olds.  They need to be guided when making decor decisions.  Tre waffled between greens and blues when asked what color he wanted his room to be.  I therefore thought it would be easiest if I gave him a select few paint swatches to choose from.  That way, I knew that we would both be satisfied with whatever color he chose because I actually chose it first as one of the options.  I left him alone with paint swatches for a while and when he had decided, he brought me the one he wanted.  By the way, it's the exact one that both my husband and I would have chosen ourselves.  Win/Win! It is a good moody dark neutral.  We did have some debate about whether or not to paint the whole room this color and if it would be too dark, but in the end we agreed to do it as the slat wall would end up offsetting it and toning it down a bit.  In my opinion, I think sometimes it is best to just go for it because decisions like this can create the biggest impact.


Now for the fun part.  Slat wall!  I had seen this application done online a few times before (thank you especially to @miainteriors on IG for a good part of all that inspo) and always knew that it was something I wanted to try.  Luckily Neil and Tre were on board for it.  We used 2" cedar boards and just cut them to length with our chop saw (they come in 8' lengths and needed to be trimmed to fit above our baseboards on our 8' tall wall) and used a brad nail gun to attach them to the wall.  We don't own a brad nail gun ourselves, but were able to borrow one from my dad.  We also don't have an air compressor, so we rented one from Home Depot for $25 a day.  And let me tell you, there is nothing more fun than using a brad nail gun!  Needless to say, an air compressor and any kind of gun that nails things are now on our tools wish list.


One thing you should know when you are measuring the wall to determine how many slats you will need is that a 2" slat is really a 1-1/2" slat.  We did not know this and did not even bother to check when we started nailing.  We therefore ran out before we got to the end and Neil had to make an extra run to Home Depot to replenish our supply.


Behold, the finished slat wall!
This project goes really fast and is very satisfying.  It's a good ego boost for one's home renovating soul.


Next task was painting the baseboards.  I don't know who decided that the unattractive orange wood color would be a good idea when they designed this house plan, but that's what we got.  Unfortunately, I should have planned a little bit better because when I got to the slat wall, I had to use a small artist's paintbrush to get between all the slats, which was a little intense for my liking.  I obviously should have painted them before the installation.  More lessons learned.  By the way, I also feel that it would have been nice to paint the baseboards the same color as the wall.  I really like this technique, but didn't think it would go over well with everyone and therefore decided that tried and true white would look nice, too.


Check out this hip new lighting.  Boob light be gone!  Can you believe we still had a boob light in our house?  Don't worry, there's a couple more left in another room, so we won't be missing that one too much.  I acquired all of these new light fixtures from Amazon.

Okay, that's it for this round.  Stay tuned for the next part of the makeover where we tackle the window treatment, new bedding, and some new custom built-in furniture.  It's going to be good!  I will also provide a full list of links in my next post of all the accessories we used.