Butterfly-Inspired Room Revamp for the Little Girls

This year is our “no travel year” for work and Chris and I decided to extended that to family as well. Last summer we took a big vacation to Disney World and Universal Studios in Florida, so this year we decided to have a more relaxed “staycation” instead. We took last week off work, but stayed home, doing family things at home or in easy driving distance and checking off a few house projects.

We’ve lived in our house for about two years and in that time the little girls’ room was decorated with hand-me-down furniture, bedding, and decor. Such is the life of the youngest siblings.

I’ve been promising them for a while that I would help them decorate their room, so that became my staycation project. I have always wanted to try wallpapering but have never had enough time for it. A week off work with no travel agenda was the perfect opportunity, so I let them choose a wallpaper and then designed the rest to match.

I’m so pleased with how it turned out that I thought I’d share it with you.

Before

For fun, here’s a before picture of their room, which shows you what we were starting with:

Their room is a generous 13 ft. by 13 ft. It had plain white walls and mostly white furniture. Addie had a loft bed with a desk on one end and shelves and drawers on the other end. Vivi had a twin-sized bed and an old-fashioned metal school deck with a wooden lid that lifted and an attached chair.

Their room was fine, except that it didn’t have a ton of personality. Oh, and 95% of the time it actually looked nothing like the picture above, which was generated by ChatGPT after I gave it a real picture of their room and the prompt, “Clean this room.”

This is how their room really looked right before the makeover. 😆

I can’t resist posting this actual real “before” photo. Because this is the reality of a six-year-old and nine-year-old sharing a room and spending their summer days playing while mom and dad are working downstairs.

But also, this disaster was caused by more than just two kids not picking up as they go. It was exacerbated by the fact that we had not done a toy purge in a long time and they simply had way too many things, and not enough storage.

So the staycation room makeover was the perfect opportunity to not just redecorate, but also to Marie Kondo all their stuff.

It took several hours to empty every drawer and shelf, and get everything out of their room into the family room (except for big furniture, which we just moved away from the walls). Then Chris spent the pretty much all of Saturday going through everything with them and helping them sort items into keep, giveaway, and trash piles while I painted. They ended up filling two extra-large moving boxes with things to giveaway and many trash bags.

Wallpapering

I’ve wanted to wallpaper an accent wall for years in one of the girls’ rooms, but I’ll admit that I’ve always been afraid to try.

Wallpaper isn’t exactly cheap and I didn’t want to invest in something that was going to look bad or fall off the walls in a few months (knock on wood that doesn’t happen). Also, we have light knockdown texture on our walls (see a closeup of our walls [JPG, 307.97 KB]) and I really debated if that meant that it needed to be smoothed first before wallpapering.

I ordered samples from multiple companies and obsessively read reviews, Reddit threads, blog posts, and watched YouTube videos for months before I got brave enough to commit to doing it.

What I used

I ended up deciding on pre-pasted Moths in Pastel wallpaper from Spoonflower. It checked the box for Addie’s and Vivi’s butterfly room request, but I love that it’s not especially childish. Hopefully it will be more teen-friendly with the turquoise, yellow, light pink, and navy color scheme and more modern illustration style. I also liked that it was designed by an individual artist and not a faceless corporation — Spoonflower is sort of like the Etsy for wallpaper and fabric.

I didn’t sand or skim coat the wall. After talking to my mom, who did a lot of wallpapering in the 90’s, I wallpapered right over the texture.

The process

Let me tell you, wallpapering is hard.

I chose pre-pasted because after reading a bunch of reviews I don’t trust peel-and-stick to not fall off the wall. So with pre-pasted, I had to unroll the paper, lay it out upside down, get the back wet, book it (folding it with the pasted side touching to activate the adhesive), then unfold and line it up on the wall.

This paper has a 1/2 inch overlap to ensure there are less visible seams, but lining it up is definitely a two person job. Luckily, Nora had a rare summer day home from work, was not out with friends, and was willing to help.

I couldn’t have done it without her.

Even with the two of us, it was still frustrating at points. There’s a spot under the window I had to patch and I did end up buying wallpaper glue for some of the edges that were curling up from not enough paste or paste drying too soon.

But all the hanging frustration aside, I am really happy with how it turned out.

After

In addition to wallpapering one wall, I also painted the other walls in their room turquoise to bring in some color, hung curtains, and rearranged their artwork. We got rid of “faux art” from big box stores and kept framed butterflies and a ladybug embroidered by my mom, a pink watercolor by my friend Melinda, and a P. Buckley Moss painting that was in my room as a girl.

The biggest improvement for space and usability was that I bought a second loft bed for Vivienne and we arranged the two beds in an L-shape together in the corner. This gives Vivi a full-sized desk, and gave them each their own cozy nook under their bed, as well as adding storage. We can never have enough storage. They have their heads together and love that they can lay and talk to one another at night time now.

Here’s a photo tour of their completed room:

I’m sure it will rarely be this clean again. 😂

It’s so satisfying to look at though, that I have already been thinking about what room I might want to do next during our all-company closure at Christmas. Maybe I’ll finally do something about the boring white walls in my office?