The New Room

In an earlier post I wrote of the treasure hunt I set up for Gwendolyn on Christmas. Here is the promised post about the gift at the end of the trail.

Way back in 2008 I painted the room which would, for the first three years of her life, belong to Gwendolyn.  The arrival of our second child made us decide to convert the other half of that room (it's really a single room divided in two by a partition) into a new bedroom for Gwendolyn and hand down the orange-and-green room to Micah.

Seeing this change as an opportunity for artistic expression, I decided on a scheme for painting the walls in Gwendolyn's New Room. Rather than the circles and curves of the nursery, I preferred lines and polygons this time. For some reason which still mystifies me, Sara agreed to my proposal for bright yellow and purple.

After some brief work with ruler, pencil, and square, the painting began:

Because the project was a surprise, and because Gwendolyn's schedule and mine rarely lined up during the day, most of the painting was done at night, after she had gone to bed. I had to sneak through her room to get to the New Room. Because it was winter, the windows had to stay shut. Which means I'm in for it when they discover, twenty years from now, all the horrible effects of inhaling the off-gases from vinyl paint.

Below you can see that the former coffee table is getting its second life:

 What would a New Room be without the assembly of a piece of Ikea furniture? Nothing, I say! We got Gwendolyn a trundle bed which ought to last her until she graduates high school. Here's my lovely wife and brother doing the hard work while I wield the camera:

Et voila! The finished New Room, with new bed and linens bought for the occasion. (Note that the purple and yellow on the walls match the same colors on the comforter:)

Plus Gwendolyn gets Sara's heirloom dresser and mirror:

 I had to keep the New Room locked until Christmas day, even though Gwendolyn knew that something for her was going on behind the door. I suspect that even before she started her Christmas morning treasure hunt she knew where it ended. Here she is discovering one of the clues in her hunt (note the pink outfit given to her by her Best Friend Kerri):

 She was so excited that she almost literally bounced off the walls. This process was aided by the fact that her first move was to test out the spring in her new mattress:

 As an added bonus, the placement of her bed affords her a view over the driveway and front of the house. When she's old enough, she'll discover that it's safe to climb out her window onto the front roof, from which she can jump to the ground without hurting herself. (I discovered this about our bathroom window at my dad's house in high school.) Here's hoping she'll never need to use it that way.

 All of January, whenever someone came to visit the house, Gwendolyn would exclaim, "Let me show you my New Room!" That made all the vinyl paint fumes I huffed worth it.

I just hope she doesn't expect a New Room every Christmas now.

~ emrys