The progress of Sia's bedroom and my favorite finds for her room

I started working on this bedroom a few weeks ago when I learned that the bed frame I ordered is arriving soon—such a thrilling moment to design my first bedroom for my daughter. I had a mood board planned out and a general idea of how I'd like the room to look, but I mainly made decisions on the go.

Here are some photos before:

Demo

First, I had to demo the space. Well, it was a light demo - no walls went down. I took off shelves on the top of the windows. I like the look, but it makes the whole room look smaller. Removing them was difficult - it's been painted repeatedly and seemed glued to the wall.

Tip: When removing old shelves, use a metal putty knife, slide it under the wood, and tap with a hammer gently till you get it off.

I also had to remove an old rack and a few other items.

Trim

Our house was built in 1900 and in the last 122 years has been painted so many times that the window's trim sunk into the walls, leaving them on the same level as the walls. Here is a photo, so you know what I mean.

You can read a blog about simple tricks I used to beautify our windows and return their previous glory here.

I did the same thing to the door that has a similar issue.

My friend came over and helped me to install the crown molding. Trust me, I'll never write a blog on that, and not looking forward to doing crown any time soon. A huge thanks to my friend, though! What he did was glorious.

The main issue with installing the crown here is that the ceilings and the walls are highly uneven. We had to band over the crown a few times, and you can see it crooked if you stand up on the ladder. But we keep a positive attitude here and try not to think about it. It is what it is, haha you can't help the walls.

After the crown, I added a chair rail 4 ft from the ceiling. I planned to add picture molding in the bottom half of the wall, but since partitions are so crooked, it would visually bring attention to the issue, so I opted out of adding those squares. Ugh, one job less - I'm not complaining.

I used a laser level to make the job easier - the little but beneficial thing that makes the job go faster.

Paint

For the paint, I chose a Portuguese dawn color by Behr in two sheens - eggshell for walls and semi-gloss for trim.

I should've painted the trim before installing the wallpaper, but baseboards and windows had to be prepped with primer before painting, and I decided to do wallpaper first.

The painting was done in two stages - first. I painted the walls with eggshell paint, let them dry, and did two coats of semigloss for trim, windows, doors, and baseboards.

Wallpaper

I used this gorgeous wallpaper with bunnies that I found at Spoonflower. When my daughter saw it for the first time, she was ecstatic! Since it is peel-and-stick, it was easy to install. I wrote a whole blog about tips and tricks to install wallpaper flawlessly.

Furniture

I wanted to get an IKEA Hemnes dresser for this bedroom, but before buying a new, I wanted to check the local Facebook marketplace. And I was in luck - I found a perfect Hemnes dresser, in excellent condition, for half a price. Yay!!

The same thing happened with nightstands. But I swapped the drawer knobs for round bronze ones to make it from IKEA to fabulous. And for nightstands, I got these cute bow knobs.