When we first moved in to this apartment, we were so excited by the luxury of a whole second bedroom. Moving from Tyler’s 150 square foot studio in Venice to this space felt unbelievable! First it was an office, then it was a nursery/office, then it was just an nursery, and then we transitioned into a toddler room, and now it is a fully-fledged big girl room. When I last blogged about this room, it looked very different!
Since the last blog post about Laelia’s room, we re-painted (in July 2013) with Benjamin Moore’s Horizon Gray. I was feeling like the old aqua color was going to compete too much with the brighter, bolder colors I knew I was bringing in for her big girl room, so I wanted a more neutral color to help ground the bright colors. And while I wanted this room to be girly and fun, we didn’t want it to scream “girl”. We finally hung the shelves and the wall dots (from All Four Walls) in February 2014. We painted the nightstands and her bed. I finished her quilt and the stripey knit blanket, I made the sleeping cloud pillow and the cardboard and fabric letters above her bed, and I added plenty of touches with some raspberry colored spray paint. I also painted some details on her curtain finials, and repainted the IKEA abacus to reinforce the color scheme. I swapped out the old black-brown Expedit for a white one, and swapped out the old cane chair for the Eames style rocking chair.

I made these letters with cardboard, tape, quilt batting, fabric and glue. I had planned on making a tutorial for how to make these, but it was delaying this project by almost 2 years! But I’ll make one if there is a big enough demand–if you want to know how I did it, please comment!

I painted the standard IKEA abacus to anchor the color scheme of the room. It’s kind of like seeing the color palate on a mood board!

Laelia’s pinwheels from her first birthday, still going strong.

To see the before and after of these $5 Rose Bowl Flea Market night stands, click here.

For more detailed information on the play kitchen, click here.

Laelia came into her room as I was winding down the photo shoot; we decided to take some photos of her in her element.

All hail Queen Laelia, first of her name. Queen of “lollipops”. Mother of MagiClip dolls. Protector of Lego realms
All in all, even though it felt like it took a long time to call this room “done”, I feel happy with it now. And most important, Laelia loves her room!
P.S. I may update this later with photos of her closet. I think photos of how I organized it could be very helpful, and we did get a new set of mesh drawers to complement the IKEA system we previously installed!