Before & After: A $190 Kids Bedroom Refresh Celebrates All the Natural Light
Sometimes spaces in your home need a full-on reno and a top-to-bottom overhaul; other times, a few cosmetic updates will go a long way in improving the look and feel of those spaces.
One bedroom at Megann Gresham’s house (@Gresham_Houze) was the kind of space that didn’t need a ton of upgrading. The room itself was in great shape, with super functional built-ins and what Megann says were the “largest closets in the house.” But the closets had mirrored doors, which you could constantly catch startling glimpses of yourself in, and the walls were covered in purple paint that just wasn’t Megann’s daughter’s favorite.
Over the years, Megann made some changes, including painting the walls light gray and (very smartly) covering up the doors with peel-and-stick floor tile. But the room stayed the same after that for a while. Then, Megann says, “My daughter started coming into her own style in the last couple years and asks me if she could have a pink room. That was literally the only motivation I needed to do an overhaul!”
Megann let her daughter choose the shade of pink she wanted on the accent wall behind the bed (Behr’s Sunset Drive). The single wall only took a quart of paint, which kept costs low. For even more pop, Megann added board-and-batten moulding to the wall. “I’m really proud of figuring out the math for that board-and-batten wall,” she says. “Math has never been my strong area, and for a long time, I shied away from board and batten because I didn’t want to mess with math. But it wasn’t nearly as hard as I had made it out to be in my head!”
Megann also framed the window with chunky moulding to create architectural interest where there was none. Moving the bed to this accent wall also helps the room feel way bigger thanks to the more efficient use of space.
The total cost for the redo — including the previous gray paint and closet upgrade — was just $190. Megann loves how it turned out, but more importantly, so does her daughter. “She was so excited to have her pink room!” Megann says.
As for the next redo she does, Megann says she’ll figure out a slightly different strategy for reviving old closet doors: “If I did it again, I would use a thin wood on the closet doors instead of peel and stick flooring,” she says. “It would have been a little more cost effective, but at the time, I didn’t know how to use power tools and went with a method that didn’t require any. Now I’ve learned to use them all, but it just goes to show you can usually find a way to make things work no matter your skill level.”
This post originally ran on Apartment Therapy. See it there: Before and After: A $190 Bedroom Refresh Has a Smart Hack for Covering Dated Closet Doors