The T-Shirt Age, Bedroom Re-Do Period

For our younger daughter, we had transitioned from baby room decor to “big girl” stylings years ago, but then at 12, that was looking behind the times as well.  So we took down the wallpaper that was in primary colors and painted the room white.  We chose white because it’s clean, bright, neutral enough to accommodate future tastes, and I just like it.

We also chucked the carpet and refinished the wood floor. I found a posting on our local freecycle group that had an offer of an 8x10 navy blue area rug, originally from Ikea. Score!

We shifted some furnishings around, mostly from an unused bedroom upstairs, and bought a new comforter. Things were looking good, but that was a whole lot of white space on the walls, and the curtains had been tossed.

I thought a giant bulletin board would be better than having a bunch of posters and things stuck on the newly painted walls. So I went to my local home improvement store looking for a piece of 4x8x2 white styrofoam insulation.  I’ve used that stuff before for a couple different things – Moses’ stone tablets, chunks of “ice” to step on in a game, and others.

I was thinking of cutting it in half the long way and getting two bulletin boards, although one really would have been enough since my daughter already had some other things to hang.

When I got there, I found one with a large chunk of one corner broken off and some smaller chunks kind of gouged into one side.  Since I only really wanted half of it anyway, I asked if I could get a discount on it because in that condition I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting it for its original purpose.  The manager agreed and instead of a discount, said I could just have it.  Another score!

Back to those free t-shirts I wrote about in the previous post.  I pulled out enough of them in shades of green to cover our now 2x8x2 piece of Styrofoam.  We cut off the backs so we’d have pieces with no writing or stains, but this could also be a way to use outgrown or thrifted ones with sports teams or band names, etc. We wrapped them over the front and hot glued them on the back.  One screw on each end with a big washer was enough to hold it up on the wall. Some giant push pins, and It’s perfect.

This picture of it is purposely blurred, to give you the idea of the size of it without broadcasting a certain person’s personal business.

Now the window.  There’s only one large, double hung window in that bedroom.  The bottom has frosted Con-Tact paper on it, there was a shade that had seen better days, and there was a valance and curtains that hung on the sides. 

We tossed the shade and hung a mini blind.  She was going to keep it half way down most of the time so we just needed a valance to add some color to the room .  T-shirts to the rescue again. 

That original windfall of a zillion shirts yielded, as you can guess, two zillion sleeves.  I had been hanging on to them, waiting for a good use and this was it.

I looped two sleeves together and slid one end on the rod.  I just kept going with all kinds of color combinations until it looked full.  Then we decided that it might look even better with something on the sides so we sliced off circles of shirts about 3-5 inches wide and looped those together.

My daughter’s had these for about eight years and they still look cute. She rearranges the furnishings from time to time but still likes the window treatment.  They’re also very easy to wash - just slide off, machine wash and dry, and slide back on in any order.

A very colorful ending to The T-Shirt Age.