February 13th

Sometimes I feel like I’m constantly redecorating Gwen’s room. Some changes have been out of necessity, like when she and her lil friend tore her bookshelves clean out of the wall. Some have been due to Gwen’s changing needs, like when we stopped using the changing table attachment on the cabinet. Others have been because an item in her room just wasn’t useful in that space, like the chair I thought we’d use for night feedings- we literally never did so it lives in my office now. I think mostly right now I’m just frustrated because I have to have a second crib in there. The room is really small so the second crib takes up a lot of the floor space and blocks the closet doors, so when it’s not in use I fold it up and put it away. At the same time though I have to leave a space for it so there’s a whole corner of her room that is empty half the time, which makes the room look unbalanced and strange.

Anyway. Her dresser was completely falling apart so last weekend we got her a replacement. I put the dresser behind the door (which is placed oddly in the middle of one wall, exacerbating all my problems with this room) and hung a shelf-with-clothes-rail over it. Now I can use her closet purely for storage (mostly Taylor’s off-season coats, too-big hand-me-downs for Gwen, and boxes and boxes of books) and with these clothes out in the open hopefully she’ll get more wear out of them. She was very excited to choose her outfit from it this morning!

All of Gwen’s handmade boots from Little Mountain.

Sorry for the lackluster image quality, Gwen’s room is not well lit.

I made the shelf using brackets and a board from Ikea (I had the shelf cut down to the length I needed by the handyman for my block) and the clothes rail is just a dowel from the craft store (I cut it to length myself). I drilled holes in the dowel & brackets, screwed everything together and painted it (1 coat of primer + 2 coats of gloss white). I already had the paint on hand so this cost less than $20. If I had to do this again I’d move the dowel forward by 1/4″ so the hangers had a little more space, prime & paint the pieces BEFORE screwing them together, and do a better job of sanding it between coats. I def half-assed some parts of this project, but it gets the job done and I think it looks pretty alright (could just be the bad lighting tho).