once upon a time I painted a mural

Our three boys share a bedroom; they have shared since the youngest was a year old. The thing is – the boys just keep getting bigger! The room is about 10’x11′, basically the size of 3 twin mattresses. We’ve been wanting to give them some more space. We decided to go up. Chris began working to enclose a portion of our attic in December. He framed in a little room, insulated it and re-worked all the heat/air.

Then he cut a hole in the ceiling of the boys’ room!

We are currently at the sanding/mudding phase on the drywall. I am so anxious to get this part over. It is the messiest and most time consuming. We still have a ways to go before we can start painting and add the flooring, but we are all excited over here. The boys especially. The loft area is just big enough for their three beds (mattresses), so it isn’t huge. My dad will be helping us build/weld stairs and a railing. Maybe by 2016 we’ll finish and I can share a little tour of the space.

Last year we enclosed part of our wrap-around front porch to make a laundry room/pantry. Huge home add-ons are an option for us right now and we don’t want to build, instead we are working to make the most of what we have!

The majority of our sheet rock work happened over one weekend. My parents kept the kids for a day and night. It is nearly superhuman all we can accomplish without kids in the house. I wouldn’t want them gone all the time, but we sure haven’t made that much progress in all the weeks since.

I’ve been working with the boys on deciding how we are going to paint and decorate the loft and their room. They don’t want white walls, which is my favorite wall color. In showing them examples of rooms, I pulled out some old pictures of my second son’s nursery. Back in the day when I only had one little boy, I spent HOURS painting a mural in the nursery. If I attempted that now, I would take me a minimum of 5 years to finish it. We moved out of the house about a year later, but the pictures make me smile….and laugh because it feels so unrealistic to even attempt something like that again!

That tiny little boy is growing up to be our resident naturalist and animal lover…And just because I was looking at old pictures…Seeing them so little feels like a lifetime ago! It is hard to believe it has really only been 8 years. Sweet little cuddly boys that let me dress them in pants in the winter instead fighting me to wear shorts in the bitter cold. Sweet little boys that didn’t have stinky feet or leave legos out for me step on at night. Sweet little boys that grew into young men that I get to have conversations with, and laugh at their odd jokes, and play non-preschool games with….sweet boys that still cuddle with their momma.

Sweet boys getting a loft that is painted one color and it won’t be momma’s favorite white. Or a mural.