The Great Teenager Room Remodel: We Put Another Hole in the Floor, and Our Paint Choices Remain Weird

 

I'd been promising my teenager that after her big sister left for college, she and I could transform the kids' old playroom into a bedroom just for her, leaving her sister their shared bedroom to have during college breaks.

You will be unsurprised to learn that this project has spun wildly out of control.

I don't think that when I was a kid, kids generally had much input in the basic infrastructure of their bedrooms. I didn't choose the floor or walls or furnishings of my childhood bedroom, at least, and Matt says that he never did, either. So I'm quite enjoying the novel process of giving my teenager total control over how her bedroom looks. Forest green walls? Sure! Paint the built-in bookshelves black? Absolutely! You want a full-sized punching bag taking up a ton of floor space? Merry Christmas!

My older kid is generally uninterested in paint and floors and furnishings, as am I, so it's been fun to see how thoughtful this teenager is, how she has a very specific vision, and how she's mostly uncompromising about bringing that vision to life. 

The project has also been a great excuse to get some long-needed repairs and renovations completed. Like, I literally learned IN LATE DECEMBER that one ought to deep clean one's carpets regularly:

Those exact same terrible carpets were also in the kid's bedroom and playroom, had been there probably since the early 1980s, and were equally as disgusting as the disgusting carpet in our bedroom.

Fun fact: that disgusting carpet is STILL in our bedroom, and still not professionally deep-cleaned, but redoing the kids' bedroom and playroom was a great excuse to hire a company to come remove that disgusting carpet, at least, and replace it with nice new bamboo flooring picked out by the teenager to match her forest green walls. 

We re-hired the same company who did an awesome job on our bathroom and family room. We might have some kind of dual curse, however, because remember how we originally hired that company just to retile our shower, and they discovered that the shower had probably been leaking into our subfloor for the entire time we'd owned the house and had rotted through a bunch of joists and studs in the bathroom and two adjacent rooms?

Well, guess which rooms had apparently had quite the termite infestation some years ago! 

Just as our original home inspection hadn't uncovered the slow leak into the subfloor, it also hadn't uncovered the fact that several joists below the kids' bedroom simply didn't exist, there was so much termite damage. To be fair, the crawlspace below that room is only a few inches high... 

Next time, we may need to request a home inspector who utilizes an RC car with a GoPro duct taped to it.

And the saga still isn't complete, because there were even more rotten joists next to the wall that faces our concrete porch, leading to the current theory that the concrete porch is funneling rainwater into the house's foundation. We're on the list to get that fixed later this Spring, fucking sigh.

But at least our brand-new floors look amazing!

The lavender bedroom walls requested by my college kid have to wait, seeing as we may have to have one of those walls rebuilt (fucking sigh!), but the forest green walls and black built-in bookshelves in my other teenager's room can start magically appearing right away:

I don't know why these SureSwatch stickers aren't available next to the paint cans in every hardware store, because they are WONDERFUL! I've been cutting each sticker in half and I think that still leaves plenty of room to stick them up and see if you like the paint color. As you can see above, my teenager went through a few rounds of paint samples before she found the one that worked best with the lighting and the floor.

And then all we had to do was make it happen!

A couple of takeaways:

1) I never want to paint built-in bookshelves again. It was miserable. They never ended. They're so tall, and also so short. And I nearly asphyxiated myself crawling into them to paint the insides because they're also so deep. Hate. Hate. HATE!!!

2) Even though this house was in rough shape when we bought it, we nevertheless pretended like it was move-in ready and did not change a thing. Kept the yellowed paint in all the rooms, kept the peeling vinyl floor, kept the thirty-year-old carpet, kept the toilet in our bathroom that was on its own homemade pedestal to give it that DIY ADA compliance vibe.

And then, of course, I just spent the next seven years complaining. The floors are terrible. The carpet is terrible. Why is the toilet so tall? Whenever we leave the house closed up for a few days, why does it always smell so musty when we come home? 

Y'all, I think that musty smell was the WALLS! After painting this stain-blocking, mold-resistant primer (recommended by our construction guys!) over that yellowed playroom paint, the house has not had that musty smell since. So next time I move houses, no matter how lazy I am, I WILL repaint!

As of now, the college kid and the teenager both have new flooring. The teenager has fresh paint, and this beautiful view from her bedroom into our newly-fenced front yard:

Beds are the current saga. Matt bought four super cheap dorm beds from our local university's surplus store, then hired a local machine shop to cut the required steel pins to the correct size to enable us to loft them, then cut a 2"x4" down to make a brace like the one in this picture:

And then we hauled them outside to lean them most elegantly against the basketball goal so we can paint them to the teenager's specifications, too:

The painted beds are actually looking amazing, so I'm glad that we put forth the effort.

The teenager didn't help, though. She conveniently had to study for her Intro to Baking final exam, humph.

I learned a lot about how to make a bed from my Dorm Chatter Facebook group:

The Dorm Chatter folks also recommend shelf liner between the mattress and topper to keep everything from slipping. I did that with my college student's dorm bed, and everything has stayed put perfectly and she reports that her bed is super comfy!

Since the kids' new loft beds are just surplus dorm beds, I'm doing the same thing. Here are my Amazon purchases, scheduled to arrive hopefully in the nick of time before my college kid gets home for Spring Break, so she doesn't have to sleep on the couch:

• Mattress Topper. Goes on top of the standard mattress to make it either softer or firmer, depending on what you prefer. My college kid really likes the one I put on her dorm mattress, so I went ahead and bought two more for the kids' new mattresses, since Matt bought the cheapest mattresses he could find and gave me no input to make sure they were the comfiest possible for my precious babies (ahem).
• Mattress Pad. This goes on top of the mattress topper to protect that non-washable surface from whatever you might get on it, whether it's soda or sweat or menstrual effluvia. I actually didn't know that these existed until Dorm Chatter opened my eyes, and then I bought one for my bed, too!
• Fitted Sheet. My little Gen Z-ers are typical for their generation in disdaining flat sheets, so I don't even argue anymore and just buy them fitted sheets. It's weirdly hard to find all-cotton fitted sheets here in the Year of Our Lord Microfiber, and I've actually already had to return a whole order of sheets that I thought were going to be cotton but weren't, grr. 

My picky teenager is certainly going to want to pick out new blankets and pillowcases in her preferred colors, too, but fortunately my easygoing college kid will be satisfied with the approximately one thousand blankets, quilts, and afghans that we already own.

And shit, I just realized I forgot to buy the bed rails for these five-foot-tall loft beds! Okay, back to Amazon I go...