The vision of the tree house bedroom

  It's been a rather busy week having my daughter visit, so I haven't been writing much here.  To my regular visitors, thank you for your continued comments, even though I've been a little photo crazy, and even though my subject matter is still my kids. Luckily for my wonderful generous readers, I discovered that I can search online for free unlicensed pictures through flicker's commons.  This will help me expand the written content to include topics that I'm interested in but that I previously would not write about due to not having a photo.  I know that most bloggers already knew this, but when you start from scratch, every discovery is something worth celebrating.   
  I also learned how to change my button on the sidebar to a graphic that I created using MS paint.  Another victory! 

In other news, Elliot learned that he could buy fake birds at the dollar store.  He was really excited about this. So for tomorrow's project we are going to go back and buy a few more, then make little stick nests for them and mount them on his bedroom wall.  Lest you think that's odd, at the beginning of the school year we painted a forest mural on his wall, with three huge trees, some big rocks, ferns, mushrooms and lots of leaves at the top.  The plan was to build a loft so that it looked like he had a tree house for a bed.  After eight months, our dream became a reality.    It was amazing that it happened.  I am incredibly frugal...being an Etsian....

    Yet, I couldn't stand the perpetual state of chaos in his room.  It had become a place that I avoided.  And that's not the kind of mom I am.  I want to enjoy visiting my son in his room once and a while, before he's so big that there's a DO NOT ENTER sign on the door.  I know that day is coming.  So, with our hopes up high and a vision of the tree house bed crystallized in our minds, we drove to the Goodwill.  The place was empty of any decent furniture, which was surprising.  Usually our store is stocked to the gills with lots of great finds.  After leaving empty handed, on a whim we stopped in at a furniture consignment shop.  They had two bunk beds. As usual, I cringed at the price tags.   Next to the beds, we saw two handmade, matching book cases that were just within my budget.   We looked at them closely.  I spoke my silent musing aloud to Elliot.  I wondered what we could build with those solid looking, free standing shelves.  It seemed that they were just right height and width (although we did not know this at the time), to put the big wood door that we had laying around in the garage...on top, which would then support his mattress.  I told the owner that we'd take them home today.  While he loaded them in the back of our vehicle, Elliot blurted out "we're going to build a bunker bed with those!"  And the man said,  "you know what, I think that would work!"
We were so excited to see our vision manifest itself that we didn't wait for Richard to get home to help us with our plan.  We used a dollie to get the book cases upstairs and the rest of it went together in five minutes.
We slapped high fives and did a victory dance right there on the spot.

Disclaimer:  I do not recommend that this be done with the cheap plywood bookcases that you can find at Walmart.  This only worked out for us because the bookcases were wide, handmade, and sturdy.

  Next we leaned an old paint ladder against the wall on one end.  Elliot's bedroom is now my (and his) favorite room in the house.  Under the bed there is  a perfect little spot for reading, complete with a small lounge chair, lamp, and smaller bookcase.  BEST of all, every book, puzzle, lego creation, star wars figure, bakugon, pokemon, car, truck, airplane and creature has a proper place!  The organization of my son's room is a bright spot in our home, and a happiness trigger for all who enter.
It makes me want to be a kid all over again.
So if I'm not blogging...you'll know where I'll be!

~I'll take a picture when we have finished adding the bird nests ;)