- Realize that your third child’s room is still basically the former office/playroom with a changing table and some of her clothes in it, and she just turned 2. Debate if you should redo it.
- Decide you must give her a properly decorated bedroom, including repainting the walls and the ceiling and buying a larger rug to brighten and warm the space.
- In a fit of initiative, go to the local paint store and collect many paint chips in the “barely distinguishable from white, but still will contrast with white trim and feels kind of warm but is not beige” category. Als,o purchase a gallon of flat white ceiling paint and the proper textured nap roller heads to tackle your textured ceiling.
- Contemplate hiring someone who will come and…do whatever process is necessary to remove all the texture from your ceilings and make them flat and smooth. Decide this is not in the budget and sounds really messy.
- Find two paint colors that seem like good contenders from the chips you brought home. Go back to the paint store and buy sample pots of each, because you have been down this road before and know that paint chips don’t tell you what a color truly will look like in a room.
- Get out your stepladder and start to wipe down the ceiling and walls with a damp cloth to prepare the surface for painting. Remove your toddler from the stepladder 9,431 times.
- Look around. Think about the fact that your child is just barely sleeping through the night and still naps, and will have to be displaced while you paint the room. Also realize you have an elderly cat who throws up on rugs, and that soon your toddler will be potty trained, which means you will have less furniture to move around while you paint if you just wait. Remove your toddler from the stepladder again.
- Put everything away for now.
- Summer arrives. Forget you have an inside of your house for two months.
- Potty train your child, provide end of life care for your elderly cat. Get through the holidays.
- Take out those sample pots of paint.
- Forgetting everything you know about almost 3-year-olds, announce “we are going to pick a new color to paint your room!”
- Acquiesce to your child’s repeated requests to “help” and allow her to use a small brush to paint the sample squares on the wall in a place in the room that gets a lot of natural light, and a place next to the trim so you can properly compare.
- As the squares dry, listen to your child loudly complain that “those aren’t colors. Those are like no color.”
- Remember that you value your child’s autonomy and free will, and try to balance that out with your strong desire to not have hot pink walls that she will hate in a year and will probably give her sleep problems.
- Because you are a home improvement media junkie, recall that you saw something on this issue of giving a child creative control over redecorating their space. Find what you are looking for on Young House Love (they talk about it here on an episode of their podcast.)
- Try their first suggestion and ask your child to pick between the two sample paint colors on the wall. Take a deep, calming breath when she again says, “those are not colors.”
- Try their second suggestion and say that we can paint the closet door the preferred pink. Pat yourself on the back when she responds with glee.
- Take it too far and bring her to the paint store to get paint chips when you go to buy the paint you decided on for the walls.
- Say 4,459 paint color names as she takes ALL THE STRIPS out of their little slots at the store and demands to know what they are called. When she veers into purples and then starts saying “Seduction! I want Seduction!” after you read the name aloud, question all of your life choices.
- Buy your two gallons of Classic Gray because you know that one won’t be enough for good coverage in an average sized bedroom, in a satin finish because it’s washable. Try not to glare at the clerk when she agrees with your daughter’s assertion that Classic Gray “is not a color.”
- Go home and look at Young House Love again, decide to just copy their closet door paint color exactly.
- Find time at some point to go back to the paint store. Again.
- Download many podcasts and/or audiobooks. Send your partner and children away, or simply say “Mommy’s painting, sorry!” with an appropriate fake regretful look and close the door.
- Live in chaos for two (three) weeks while your toddler sleeps in her brothers’ room, nothing is where it should be, you ignore all other household chores that you normally do, and you have various painting supplies everywhere while you still work and feed everyone and keep up with Scandal.
- Whenever possible, squeeze in a few hours of painting. This will be helped by allowing your child to paint on a very open section of wall with a very small brush while you are doing the ceiling or first coat, and by a lot of television for the second coat and trim.
Photo by Yoann Siloine on Unsplash - Finally load everything back in, except the crappy toys you wanted to get rid of anyway that your child hasn’t noticed to be missing in two weeks.
- Agonize over putting new holes in the beautiful, smooth walls for a few more weeks.
- Grow tired of never having a place to hang your child’s bath towel, install the cool hook racks you bought when you were pregnant with your third child and hang the print you bought from Etsy when you thought you might have a third baby someday.
- A mere year later, sit back and admire your work. Think to yourself that you could totally have an HGTV show of your own (time lapse would work, right?)
