Travel-Inspired Homemaking

 The pandas are waving good-bye.  It was sad to see them go, but their room was getting worn out and grubby.  It's been time for a new coat of paint for awhile now, but I didn't have the mojo for it.  So I stored paint chips in the cupboard and waited for inspiration.  Inspiration always strikes in January.  I think it's a coping mechanism.  I always do a lot of planning, dreaming about travel and tackling big projects in January, probably to distract me from the inversion and the single digits on the thermometer. 

Scott rolls his eyes whenever kids switch rooms, but I told him that's the price we have to pay for cleanliness and dejunking.  If we're going to deep clean, there has to be an element of fun...like a new paint color and a new place to set up camp.  I think it's my Dutch blood, this drive to reclaim territory.  The Dutch reclaimed land from the sea by building dykes.  I reclaim tired rooms by updating them and making them seem new.  It's a good thing I was never in charge of building a dyke, however, because I sometimes lose steam when the project is 90% done.  This time, I enlisted Trajan to help me and gave myself two days;  three if you count the first day, when I bought the paint and cleared out the rooms.  While Coco watched the kids, Trajan ran the roller and I cut in with a paint brush.  Two days later, we had this:

A travel-inspired tween den with a dash of dog art.

Freestone's art from when he was three.  One of my favorites.

The top bunk is Ari's.  My original inspiration was the Pottery Barn plaid.  I trolled Downeast and found several pillow shams for a couple of dollars each (They were on clearance for $26 on the Pottery Barn website!I saved 90% off the clearance price!) , but I never found a bedspread.  Grandma made the owl pillow.

This red trunk, rumor has it, is one that my great-grandfather bought at the train station.  He was a Storage Wars pioneer, bidding on abandoned steamer trunks and selling the contents.  Once, a friend of my mom's found a trunk like this one in an antique store.  It said "James J. DeBry" on the inside, so she bought it, and my mom still has it.

Ari and Freestone came up with the paint design.  (We took this picture before we centered the bed.) Ari wanted blue on the top and Freestone wanted red on the bottom.  We're still working on the bedspread situation.  When you re-do rooms as frequently as we do, you can't buy all new stuff.  We are still deciding which bedspreads to repurpose for this room.  The important thing is that Freestone's Kindle is charged, ready to go.  He is doing some remodeling of his own, building a new house on Minecraft.

The catch with cheap Pottery Barn rejects is that they're monogrammed with someone else's name.  I started to unpick them, but it takes longer than you think!  So Ari is Maclean and Freestone is Oscar.  For now.

Grandma's space pillow fits in with our travel theme.  Did you know there are six people in space right now?  There's a website called howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com.

I made this out of paper and modge podged it.  Don't look too close...it's impressionistic.  I eyeballed the shape of the U.S.

Where shall we go next?  I want to go to Hong Kong, Scott says Austria.  But our budget says maybe the Grand Canyon.

For now, we're happy here in our newly reclaimed tween den.  It has been said that not all who wander are lost.  For a girl with so much wanderlust in my blood, I'm certainly content at home.  I guess not all adventure requires passage.