Master Bedroom REVEAL! Part 1 - Before Pictures

I am So Excited to finally show you my bedroom!! I decided to do this in several parts because I want to document the WHOLE story and it's going to be one very long post if I keep it all together. =)

A little background...we have 8 children ages 13 & under, living in a 1300 square foot home built in 1994 with 3 bedrooms and a teeny backyard.  We are in a nice neighborhood and have been here for almost 14 years.  LOVE our home, it is actually a super cute starter home as it was when we bought it, pregnant with (awww so cute) our first baby after being married for just one year!  But....with all these bodies, it is definitely getting rundown and it seems like due to lack of money for our whole stay here, we have just been basically "existing" here.

For instance, our garage door opener ($200 to fix) has been broken for at least 3 years.  We last painted the interior when my 8 year old daughter was in utero.  Our cute little electric fireplace has not worked for maybe 9 years.  Trying to keep food on the table and all these kids clothed just kinda takes priority, you know how it is.  I've done my best with what I have -- and I have had lots of fun throughout the years decorating my whole entire house in an Italian/Tuscan theme from thrift stores and garage sales --- and the occasional Ross Dress 4 Less purchase.  Which isn't bad, not at all -- but now is getting just, old.  Tired.  Pretty much, late 90's decor.   I'm so done with it!

This is my living room at it's absolute finest, about 2 years ago.  Currently I have sold or gotten rid of just about everything you see except the brown chair and table/chairs lol!

For my 8th baby, after spending 7 YEARS in an ugly unfinished master bedroom I decided that I was going to "change my family tree" as Dave Ramsey likes to say.  I may suck at decorating (and I seriously did up until Pinterest, LOVE YOU PINTEREST!!!!!!!!) and we might not have ANY money for decorating, but I decided once and for all to start room by room and completely and totally REVAMP my house.  Make it so beautiful that I would LOVE to be there, and just love every single thing about it just like when I drool over the Pottery Barn catalogs.

And I wanted to start with my bedroom.  It absolutely gives me goosebumps and brings tears to my eyes as I look back now at how darn HARD I worked after days of already working hard with the kids, to little by little bring my room to magical life.  I can't believe I did it.  I changed my room!! Changed the entire look and feel of it.  It now looks like it is straight out of a magazine and I LOVE IT SO MUCH!!! My goal was to create a place that DH & I can go to relax, and it will be a place to call our own.

Something like a sanctuary.  No kids allowed in there to mess it up, lol, unless we are in there with them.

I also knew that with the baby coming, I would spend many moons in there nursing.  Like, hours upon hours upon HOURS --- and many nights turned into days into nights and well, you know how it is with newborns.  I didn't want to have one more postpartum in the ugly room that was before.

My room exceeded my wildest dreams, and I remember specifically THIS dresser that I bought on Craigslist and painted, loving it so much that it was my place of "serenity" and "peace" I went to during my natural labor when the birth pains were just too much to bear.  It.was.beautiful.

The rest of my house is in AWFUL shape.  Oh my word.  Seriously.  But.  My bedroom gives me hope!! It lifts my spirits because it's like being in debt -- one credit card is "completely paid off!!" One room is completely done.  Yes I have like a zillion other rooms and "spaces" to redo.  But just as if when one has a million credit cards, if you take it ONE AT A TIME and work diligently...little by little...it will happen!

I am determined to have the house of my dreams.  EVEN with eight kids who, um, destroy everything in sight even though they don't mean to.  EVEN with a very teensy budget.  EVEN with seriously minus zero time.  And I am going to do it myself!  My husband is awesome in every single way you can imagine, he works very hard to provide for our family so I can stay home with our children, and pretty much collapses when he gets home.  Often 12 hour days on salary, often traveling, in addition to putting in lots of hours fundraising for our church we are very involved in.  He's left it all up to me and I'm actually pretty much ok with that!

So.  My friends.  I am going to make it happen.  If I can transform a room like this, WHILE largely pregnant with baby #8, seriously anyone can do it!  Oh, I had such fun! So much fun and so many many hours perusing Pinterest and sneaking away while the kids were sleeping in the evening to shop thrift stores and garage sales on Saturday mornings early.  Craigslist became my friend and my husband's truck/pickup "delivery" service as well. (hee hee)

But it was also hard, too.  Really hard.  Hard because all day long I would work on just keeping the house clean, making meals, doing laundry, homework, morning to night taking care of my large family.  I felt a sense of urgency as the pregnancy progressed, knowing that my tummy was only going to get heavier and heavier and everything harder and harder.  Nights would come where I was so tired and my feet hurt, I told myself just to do one thing.  Each day, at some point, if I could do just ONE thing that was a forward step towards making my room beautiful and finished by the time the baby arrived, then It Would Happen.  Some days all I did was screw in a couple of lightbulbs.  Or wash one side of one door in prep for paint.  Slowly but surely it certainly did happen, and that gives me hope for the rest of the house now!

7 Months Pregnant...learning from my Dad how to operate a nail gun!

Also, let's talk money a little bit.  DH & I have been for the last 5 years trying to become debt free.  Ahhh yes, and you know what happens when you try to do THAT!! Things happen, like babies and unexpected legal fees and job uncertainties and lots of things beyond our control.  So I knew that even though I had all these hopes and dreams for my home, the only real reality is that everything would have to be done the absolute CHEAPEST way possible.

Read: do it myself.

Everything that I bought would have to be using my own "egg" money so to speak.  We did not have, and still don't, a "renovations" fund.  Ha! Yeah right.  Especially trying to become debt free, Dave Ramsey would, um, laugh so hard!

BUT.  Dave Ramsey (yes, we are Financial Peace University graduates!!) does say that each of us should, for sanity's sake, have a "blow money" fund.  (DH says do NOT call it that, haha! So we call it our "spending money)  The amount we came up with for our budget, was $50 each, per month.

Hmmm.

Not going to take me very far, but I'll take it!  I treasured that $50 and enjoyed spending it GUILT FREE on whatever was next on my list for my room.  Or saving even up to 3 month's worth so I could buy something special like my chandelier.

Other than that, the way I funded my "rejuvenation project" was by selling things around the house on Ebay, royalties from my Ebay sellers guide ebooks, flipping items I found for amazing prices at garage sales by reselling them on craigslist, birthday money, getting creative with investing my money.  I even won a giveaway for $100 on a blog for an outdoor weather cover company.  We don't have any grills or hot tubs or anything that needs a cover, so I did some research and ended up choosing 5 bbq grill covers JUST so I could sell them and turn them into something fun for my room.  When you are forced to, you can become very creative with ways to create money!

Click Here to see Part 2 of Master Bedroom REVEAL - "During" Pictures

Click Here to see Part 3 of Master Bedroom REVEAL - After Pictures