Superhero Room - Done!

It's home improvement season here at the House of Notarte. Some projects have been foisted upon us (thank you stupid old garage door!) and others have thankfully been fun and by choice. Some day, we'll actually get to our own bedroom, but since Alex was heading out of town to visit his Nanna for 9 loooong days, we decided to rework the play room to be his and his little brother's bedroom.

First some background: the HoN (House of Notarte) has turned into a bit of a hostel of late. My dad crashes with us a bit every week when he's in town for work. My brother-in-law has just moved in now that he's back in the area, looking for work. Needless to say, it's been a full house and I've been looking for ways to make the best use of our four bedroom house. One of the bedrooms has been a playroom/office/guest room since we moved in four years ago. My dad has the 2nd bedroom and Alex had the third (Master is the fourth - Ernest, me and Rey take up that room). My bro-in-law was crashing in the playroom/office/guest room - let's just say that the room wasn't setup for such multitasking.

We've often talked to Alex about moving him (and Rey - someday!) into the playroom. It's a pretty big room and I've always thought they would enjoy sharing the space. I've always hated the wall colors in that room; the previous owners were huge WSU fans, so the walls were grey and maroon. Ick. You know how much I hated that room? I couldn't find one single picture of it since we moved in three years ago. Here's what it looked like back then:

This actually looks way better than it did once we moved in.

So, we took the opportunity to surprise Alex with a superhero room while he was gone. It was our own version of While You Were Out - minus the crafty carpenter, able designer and television crew (oh - and $1000 budget!).

We took our inspiration from this Pottery Barn room. I love that it screams superhero without being over-the-top or tacky. We went with the overall color theme and started looking for accents to make the room superhero-ific.

The first problem we ran into was that the cool wall decal of gotham city in that picture is no longer available. So sad. Enter Etsy: Karissa found this one and they were able to ship it to me within 3 business days.

Applying the decal was pretty easy - it's not as easy as the peel and stick ones you can buy at Target, for example, but we managed to get it on there looking fantastic. It took about two hours, mostly 'cause we are very very cautious and took our time.

We also bought a big Spiderman decal for the other wall. This one was one of the kind that you can reapply over and over, so this process only took a few minutes. It's not nearly as cool, but the kids love it just as much.

I picked up some Superhero squad sheets at Walmart, as well as a throw. Luckily, and not surprisingly, we had plenty of superhero toys, so I pulled them out and used them as accents as well.

We did make one obligatory trip to Ikea in which we purchased a new storage unit that we put behind the door, a new carpet and various other times (probably under $5 each) that somehow totaled $250. I like to call that the Ikea effect.

I also got a little crafty, pulling out my sewing machine to sew up the window seat cover. That was a bigger undertaking than I expected, but it turned out really great. Just don't look too closely, kay?

Let me just say right now that the room turned out FREAKING OSSUM. I wish it were my room. Here's Alex walking into it the first time. He had no idea we were doing this.

He freaking loves it too. The first night, he sat up in bed while we were putting him to sleep and said, "I just want to look at my room". Of course, I really think that the reason they love it is because all their toys are organized now, so it's like they got a bunch of new stuff to play with.

Check it out:

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