The Big Girl Room

While we are now pretty ready for our new baby girl to arrive (due date is about 2 1/2 weeks away), this is a recent development.  We had a lot of things, at least in my mind, that needed to get done.

We have 3 bedrooms upstairs, our bedroom and then each of the girls had a room.  So, we needed to combine Katelyn and Brooklyn into one bedroom and leave the nursery for the new baby.  The bedrooms are fairly small, so the only way to fit two twin size beds was to get a set of bunk beds.  The girls both went from toddler size beds to twin size.

Katelyn's Bedroom before (toddler bed)

Bedroom before

Kyle cleaning after the bed was gone

By the time the bed was down, there wasn't enough time to make the entire bed frame before bed time that night, so Katelyn slept on the floor.

Daddy's helpers.

Climbing up into the new bed.

The final product!

I bought the bedspreads for them a while back when I saw that they were being clearanced as this was the theme that we had used when Katelyn was moved into the bedroom with toddler bedding.  I still love the bedroom theme.

Overall, I would say the girls like sharing a room, but it took SEVERAL weeks for them to get adjusted at bed time and nap time.  They would just talk and play and for a few weeks Katelyn took no naps and Brooklyn rarely napped.  Brooklyn would get out of bed like 4 times everytime I put her down (which was not at all like her before).  I was going crazy and they were pretty cranky too.  I think they have finally adjusted and Katelyn napped several times this week.  I think it was also just bad timing with her age and the fact that she doesn't need as much sleep.  So on days when they have napped, we are now letting them stay up quite a bit later than ever before, which has both good and bad points.


In addition to the beds, there were a couple of other improvements that I made.  One was buying a large toy box from IKEA for the girls' dress-up clothes.  They love to play dress-up and they had a large box in Katelyn's room and one in the hallway full of clothing that is now combined into one container.  It looks way better, although it doesn't slide open as easily as I would like on the carpet.

Before - Dress-up box in the bedroom

Before - Dress-up box in the hallway shelving unit

After  - All the dress-up clothes now fit in the this new box by their bed (and it gives us a seat in their room)

We also had a stuffed animal issue.  They were mainly just piled into a corner in Katelyn's bedroom.  I picked up a cute trashcan from IKEA and now they stay much more contained.

Before - All the animals in the corner

After

Kyle also had to build an additional shelf and rod in the closet to accomodate Brooklyn's clothing.  We generally have only used one side of the closet for hanging items and then I have shelving on the other side for clothes that are too big that I have bought at consignment sales, etc.  Getting the clothes for both girls to fit in one room (the dresser is pretty small) has been a little bit of an issue.

Before (Kyle added the top shelf a while back)

After

I would still like to get some cute curtains up and we will need to do some moving around of photos/wall decor, but other than that, it is pretty much done.  A new dresser will be needed when their clothing gets bigger, but for now, we are trying to make it work.


The baby nursery didn't need a ton of work, except that we remodeled our master bedroom closet the same week we moved Brooklyn and so our entire master closet was in baby room for about a month, which was really stressing me out.  (More to come on the master closet in another post.)  Kyle also had to convert the crib back to a crib as we had taken off the side and it was being used as a toddler bedding.  We did a thorough cleaning of the entire room and unloaded several boxes of baby items that were being stored in the rafters of the garage.  It is now ready and I am much relieved.