The boy was the first born so he naturally got the second biggest bedroom after ours. When Fifi came along, she got the next biggest and all was well. Until a couple of months ago at any rate. We’d already started talking about redecorating the boys room since at three and a half it was perhaps a little embarrassing for him to have a nursery border and curtains up. Something with pirates wifey said, something with spaceships I chipped in and the discussion continued.
The boy kick started something a bit more radical however by turning from the easiest sleeper into a child you had to wrap in his duvet and peg it to get the door shut before he unravelled himself and hurtled out of bed towards his vanishing parent. Rational discussion has really been out of the question but without a shadow of a doubt, he’s taken a real dislike to his bedroom and “there might be scary monsters”.
Wifey began tentatively discussing the prospect of a room swap with Fifi a month or so ago and he seemed very keen on the idea, even though it would be a move to a room of about two thirds the size. A month of talking to him about it hadn’t put him off so this weekend I sought the peace of my MP3 player and started shifting furniture around whilst the kids drove wifey up the wall.
It’s surprising in both terms of weight and quantity how much stuff two children with a combined age of 5 have already accumulated. I started at about 10.30 in the morning and didn’t finish moving the furniture around until about 3pm. Of course that meant I had to move all the assorted piles of crap from everywhere first, and some stuff needed moving two or three times due to space limitations. Good job I used to be world class at Tetris.
So the move is more or less done now, bar some tidying up and its time to look at new furniture. The boy has expressed an interest in a high bed with a den under it and we thought this would be great use of space. At the moment though we’ve only seen what I consider the bottom end and the top. At the bottom for under £200 we could get a rickety IKEA high bed. The display model wasn’t brilliantly screwed together and wobbled with the boy on it. At the other end, for four times the price, was a lovel Flexa system. It was sturdy enough to be almost indestructable, it had lovely touches like rounded edges to stop nasty bumps but it cost more than we spend on a week long family holiday and we’ve baulked at the price. I can understand how long it will last but well over £600 for a kids bed is a high hurdle to take.If anybody has any other recommendations I would dearly love to hear them.
Fortunately one other decision was easier to make, removing Fifi’s lovely Mungai Mirror wrecked the wallpaper (it was over a bad join so it was inevitable in a way), so the whole wall now needs repapering. Fortunately thanks to the lovely patient people at Walltastic, I have an enormous wallpaper mural of Spider-man to put up. I’ve done a lot of wallpapering in the past, including a couple of walls of patterned paper (and a staircase that required the use of planks and ladders but that’s another story), so I’m hoping it will be fairly straightforward as it goes up just like normal patterned wallpaper. Theres a picture below for your delectation: how can a 4-at-Easter-year-old not love this?!
