Milo's bed

I am in love with the color. After Milo said that he wanted a green room, I selected about 10 shades of green, and he chose this one, Benjamin Moore’s Dark Celery.

Since Benjamin Moore paints are a little pricey for a 3-year-old’s bedroom, I took the color chips to Lowe’s and had them color match it. Now I want to paint every room in the house this color. Somewhere, Matt is reading this and shaking his head, “No, no, no.” He refers to the color as “70s green” or “Army Green,” but Milo and I both like it a lot. Just look at this kid!

Milo on his bed

Milo and I had talked a lot earlier this year about what he wanted his new bedroom to look like. Since one of Milo’s favorite places in town is Portland Nursery, and he loves looking at the plants and garden gnomes, I had suggested an enchanted forest theme as a possibility, and he jumped all over it.

It was important to me that we didn’t go overboard and make everything too theme-y. It’s a small room, and his interests are going to change a lot over the next few years, so I didn’t want to invest hundreds of dollars in decor, fabrics, and knick-knacks only to have him be totally sick of them by this time next year.

Instead, we focused on inexpensive, subtle touches. I used Martha Stewart’s Woodlands scrapbooking paper pad to make backgrounds for picture frames and to cover light switches and outlets:

wall of pictures hung at his height

light switch

outlet cover

Using vases from IKEA, we built him terrariums and incorporated his favorite forest friends:

terrarium with gnome

terrarium with mushroom

Once those new touches were added, we found that some of the decor and bedding he already had and loved just seemed to fit right in, like it was meant to be there.

It was worth all of the work!

This is what the living room looked like (blurry pals not typically included):

lovely friends; boring curtains

Here are the new curtains!

curtains from kitchen

front window curtains

rumply couch and curtains

So what you might be saying now is, “Uh. Hey. Those don’t match.” No, no they don’t.

A little backstory: I have been lusting over Amy Butler’s Nigella line since it was introduced. The combination of the Neo-Romantic designs with the nature-inspired palette makes me swoon hardcore. When I was working on the idea boards for our home, the Nigella line heavily influenced my color choices for the living room right from the start:

living room idea board

But home decorating fabric is expensive—$10-18 a yard usually—and curtains and pillows use up a lot of fabric. To make four window panels for my almost-floor-to-ceiling windows, I’d need 10 yards of fabric. So even if I found a good deal, I’d be looking at $150 just for curtains. That may seem reasonable to some people, but I’m frugal. That number makes me cringe. Thus, I started searching Etsy and eBay regularly for discounts on fabric, and lucked out with some post-Christmas sales. The fabric for my curtains ended up being $55.

Sure: they don’t match. But that’s kind of more of our style, anyway. May I remind you what Matthew wanted to do in our living room?

Potato Champion cart

He wanted to paint big zig-zags on the wall, ala the Potato Champion cart. But, you know, sans lumberjack. I like to think that I got pretty close with the fabric for the curtains behind the couch:

Amy Butler Nigella: Ritzy Stripe Nickel

The beige curtains that were in the living room have been moved into Milo’s room, where they’re picking up a little bit of the beige in his quilt and serving the practical duty of keeping out the draft from the windows, since they’re much thicker than the summer-weight curtains that were in there.

At some point in the future, we’re going to hang double-curtain rods so that we can hang sheer privacy curtains behind these that let in light, but these are doing the trick for the winter weather.

Come over and have a cup of tea on the couch with me!

Milo's room

So here you have it, the 10 Minute Tidy Up:

1. Very quickly pick up everything that isn’t where it should be and put it on the bed.
2. Divide what is on the bed into logical categories. One category should always be “Doesn’t belong in this room.” (If I’m tidying Milo’s room, the categories would be: “Dirty laundry,” “Clean clothes,” “Costumes,” “Toys,” “Trash,” “Doesn’t belong in this room.”)
3. Put away the easy stuff first. (Dirty laundry goes in hamper, clean clothes go in closet or drawers, toys go in toy chest, trash goes in trashcan.)
4. For the pile of things that doesn’t belong in the room, ask yourself if it often ends up here, and so would it thus make sense to have it live there permanently. Think about making a home for it there so that it can still be put away rather than just sitting on the floor. Likewise, if the dirty laundry ends up in the same spot, consider moving a hamper closer to that spot. In the meantime, take that stuff out of the room you’re tidying.
5. Vacuum or sweep. It’s a simple step that makes any room look a thousand times cleaner.

The end!

I know a mom who has five kids and every night right before she goes to bed, she walks around the house and puts all the clutter into a big box and then puts the box in a closet in the guest room. That way, if her kids want to know where their stuff ended up, they don’t need to ask her, they just check the box. If they don’t want their stuff ending up in the box, they can clean up after themselves better. I think that is a genius solution and might use it myself when Milo is older. Right now, he thinks that cleaning and tidying is a novelty, and really loves to help. He evens pick up after me and his dad: if my water bottle isn’t where it usually is, he’ll bring it to me saying: “Back, back,” meaning, “Put it back, mom.” I love this phase, but I know it won’t last forever.