Our house has four bedrooms, but since we moved in as just a couple with no kids we’ve never really used all four effectively. We started with two guest rooms, our bedroom and a storage room on the 3rd floor. Eventually, we renovated the 3rd floor (it used to have shiny animal safari print wallpaper), moved our master bedroom up there, and then used two-second floor bedrooms as kid rooms and one as a guest room. The nursery room has been through several renovations (original first-kid nursery, monsters, Lincoln’s nursery) and the bunk room used to be a playroom/Caroline’s nursery.  If you want a whole house tour, my most recent was in 2012 (probably the last time my house was ever all clean at the same time!) but the video below is much more accurate of the “before” status of the kid rooms.

It’s really bad. And this wasn’t even peek-disaster. Just regular disaster. Also, I am still learning how to use my DSLR for video, so excuse my technical errors.

But now, we have three great kid rooms! The kids like them but I like them the most. It’s so much easier to keep clean and put away laundry and organize stuff. When I want to move a toy or category of toys upstairs, I have room for them. Everyone’s laundry baskets are easy to find and they are actually putting their dirty clothes into the baskets. I will probably lose my infatuation before too long and they’ll all end up a huge mess I shout at the children to clean every Saturday, but for now, it’s the best.

Let’s start with Evan’s room, which was previously the guest room.

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E bought some really deep, strong anchors for all the shelves, so they’re very secure.

Almost everything is from Ikea. The bedding is from Target. I offered to move the dollhouse somewhere else, since I wasn’t sure he wanted it in his Big Kid room but Evan asked to keep it, so he and Linc can play with it (and they have been! Which is a change, it hardly ever got played with before.) The Force Is Strong With This One decal is just a sticker I bought on Amazon and you can buy it here.

Now to Caroline’s room:

Again, almost everything is from Ikea and the bedding is from Target. The Unicorns are Real wall hanging is from Amazon and you can buy it here. She Persisted is amazing and you can buy your copy here.

The last room is the bunk room, which Linc and Finnegan officially share. We haven’t done too much in there yet, besides clean it and change out bedding. I need to touch up the paint and move some more toys up there. But right now Evan is letting Linc sleep with him in his new room most of the time so Finnegan has the whole huge room to himself and has no opinion on my lack of formal decorating.

Again, the bedding is from Target and everything else in this room was repurposed or moved from a previous room. It’s not going to win any design awards but the boys like it and it’s a HUGE improvement over that before video.

And that’s how our upstairs looks now! I don’t think we’ll have to redo any of these spaces again…maybe ever? We don’t plan to live here the rest of our lives. Hopefully, we move to somewhere with five bedrooms before Linc and Finn are teenagers and can’t stand to share anymore.

Oh hai, want to see where I live? I’m wicked nosy when it comes to houses (I became a real estate agent for a while pretty much just so I could see the insides of more homes) and I figure some of you guys are too. I was going to make this a linky hop party but I’m not organized enough to get one set up – but if you have a home or room tour (old or new) PLEASE leave me a link in the comments!!

I lot has changed since my last home tour in April 2010, and although I’ve documented most of our renovations step by step I thought it would be fun to show you the whole house at once. (Although the original tour has a lot more good pictures of my collections and furniture.) I’ll try to include links to the updates so you can see some of the “before” type pictures, or check out my Home & Garden category for a whole roundup. For the record, I’d like to state that although I love my house I am not an interior designer, professional painter, a home photographer or even a very good DIY-er so don’t judge me too harshly, OK?

Tiny bit of history: the house was built in 1913 by Mr. Church, who ran a funeral home here in town. His funeral home business actually still exists, and is just a couple streets over. My house is turning 100 next year and I think I’m going to throw it a birthday party.

Our property goes from that hedge on the left to the driveway on the right, although technically the lines fall closer to half-way through the house on the left and 3 feet into our yard on the right. I suspect we’ll have to have a survey done if (when) we sell.

Front steps

Flowers

More Flowers

Front door

This is going to be a REALLY long, REALLY picture heavy post, so if you’re on the home page you can click though to see the rest… (more…)