Decorating Our Kid's Room

We finished up our home study interviews, and we're now starting the major paperwork project for our adoption: The dossier that will be sent to the Chinese government.

In the meantime, we've turned our attention to what will be our child's bedroom.

We moved into our house around Christmas, and repainted our bedroom, but decided to wait on doing the walls in the second bedroom. We stripped off the wallpaper, but then just cleaned it up and moved our desks in there to use the room as an office area.

When school finished up for the summer, we hauled all the furniture out and got to work on painting. Last week we finished up the painting of the walls and it was time to start decorating.

We've got plans in the works with a contractor to expand our attic into another bedroom, which will actually serve as our office area once it is ready. The second bedroom downstairs will be our daughter's room (we are at this point fairly certain we are adopting a girl), although the office stuff will go back in there temporarily until the upstairs work gets done.

Meanwhile we are starting to decorate the room for our daughter.

Gynn did an incredible job with her stenciling project. She decided to do stencils of the Chinese zodiac animals along the top of the walls.

She drew the animals and the Chinese characters for each animal freehand and cut the stencils herself, and then painted them in bright colors.

The results look great. Here are the individual animals. I'm presenting them in order. If you'd like to know which is "your" animal, you can find out here. I'm a monkey and Gynn is a rat.

First up is the Rat.

The Rat is followed by the Ox (actually a water buffalo in ancient China).

Next up is the tiger.

Following the Tiger is the Rabbit.

And next is the Dragon.

Rounding out the first half of the Chinese Zodiac is the Snake.

Next up is the Horse.

Then the Sheep, which in ancient China was actually a goat, which is the way Gynn drew it.

After the Goat comes the Monkey.

Next is the Rooster.

And then the Dog. Gynn had lots of options for different types of dogs to draw. She decided on something along the lines of a husky.

The final animal in the Chinese Zodiac is the Pig.

Here are some shots of different parts of the room with the stencil work. We had room to do each animal twice except for the pig, which appears once. There is a space over the door where we could put the second pig, but we're thinking of reserving that space for something else.

Here is a tour around the room with the completed stenciling in place.

We're going around clockwise, starting from next to the door.

Rabbit, Dragon, and Snake guard the closet.

As we move around from the closet, we come to the other major item we added to the room recently, this pirate ship painting that was painted by Irene Santos, a co-worker of mine. We bought it at our school's annual auction a couple of weeks ago. The painting was done on an old window.

Here's a closeup:

Here are the Rooster, Dog, Pig, and Rat in the corner. The pig is the last of the first set through the animals.

Continuing along the room, here are the animals on along the wall opposite the door.

The lighted circle in the upper left of the photo isn't an electric light. It's a sun-tunnel, a skylight that brings in sunlight through a mirrored tube. It's a feature we had put into both bedrooms when we first moved in.

Here are the rest of the animals on that wall.

And finally the last wall. Gynn painted the outlet and lightswitch covers with the same paint that she used for the stenciling. You can see one of them here.

We're currently moving desks and file cabinets back into the room, but we're eagerly looking forward to the day when our daughter will call this room home.