Garrett's Room

I've intended to post this for atleast a week now, but I'm just now getting around to doing it. My apologies for those who were waiting with bated breath. haha

As I've explained before, Garrett moved out of his old room and into what used to be our guest room. In the move, I've attempted to reorganize Garrett and all his things in order to keep his toys from overtaking our house.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good shot of our former guest room on this computer, so here's the next best thing. Right around when Garrett turned 2, he discovered our board games in the guest room closet and had a grand ole' time playing them following his own rules and mixing and matching game pieces. So here's a shot of him in the room before it became his bedroom.

During the moving process, while Keith was painting, Garrett was "helping". Such a good helper, don't you think?
And now here's the finished product. I know that a lot of kids' rooms have cute murals and wonderful paint schemes, but I just don't have that talent, or that kind of time, so we stuck with refreshing our current paint color and then went with a generic Disney theme. Garrett is a big fan of a variety of Disney movies so I couldn't pick just one. This made it easier to just go with several that he currently likes. It won't be hard to change it up when his interests change, as we all know they will.

This picture was taken from the doorway. Garrett wanted to be included in the shot. He still has a John Deere pillow on his bed (which was his nursery theme) because he loves that pillow very much. I'm on the hunt for a similar pillow except with some sort of Disney character on it, but I haven't been successful so far. Unless I go with Hannah Montana, but I doubt Garrett or Keith would like that very much. In case the posters aren't self-explanatory, one is from the movie "Cars" and the other is from "Toy Story 2". Garrett loves to set up all his Toy Story characters to look like they do in the poster. The rug on the floor is a "Cars" rug with a road to drive cars on. I would really like to find a different bedskirt than the one currently on his bed because I would prefer a blue one rather than green, but that's way down the bottom of my list of things to do.

This shot was taken from the window looking towards the door and the closet. I'm still deciding if I want to rehang the wooden letters that spell "Garrett" and if I do, they will go above the clock. So right now that wall looks a little bare, but at this point, I'm happy with it. I love the hot wheels organizer on his closet door. That has been such a help in keeping his cars organized. Inside the wooden toy box are all his musical toys and big trucks and cars (no small toys to prevent something getting lost). Inside the baskets are miscellaneous toys and I've got several other baskets in the top of his closet with more miscellaneous toys and I switch out the baskets periodically so he doesn't get tired of the same toys, but also to keep from having every single toy he owns out at once. It's really helping to keep his room clean and the rest of the house from getting too cluttered with toys, since we don't have a toy room or a play room.

This picture was taken from the corner by the closet door. One poster is from the movie "Monsters, Inc" the other poster was totally Garrett's choice. I knew I wanted one more, but couldn't find another poster that wasn't a ridiculous amount of money, so one day we were looking through the Walmart posters (flipping quickly through the scantily clad women posters) and they had 3 Spiderman posters. He's a big fan of Spiderman's right now, so I told him he could pick one to hang in his room. I figured he would pick one of the 2 that had just Spiderman on them, but instead, he picked the one with every Marvel comics character on it, with Spiderman standing in the front. He asks me all the time who they all are (there's probably a hundred or more in the poster) and I can only tell him 2 or 3 that I recognize. So any comic buffs out there are welcome to come by and name those characters for us.

In the picture, Garrett is watching a worm that's crawling down the wall, hence the reason why he's not looking at me. We are currently having issues with little inch worms getting in our house. Garrett loves watching them and playing with them. Yes, he's all boy and no, I don't encourage the playing part, but I have to be honest and say that I've heard "Hey, Momma, the worm is riding on Thomas!" many times in the past few weeks. (Thomas being Thomas the train, for the uninformed.) Back to the picture, the train table was free, given to us by some awesome friends who were cleaning out their kids' rooms before Christmas, so we keep all his Geo Trax train equipment inside of it and a few of the bigger pieces on top of or underneath it. His Thomas train set either stays in the living room for a few days at a time or it's in a container in the top of Garrett's closet. I couldn't tolerate having both train sets out at the same time, it's too much of a mess.And the final picture. One shot of his closet. Something that sold me on our house is that all of the closets are walk-in, so there is more to it than what you can see, but it's almost impossible to take a good picture of a walk-in closet, as I discovered the day I was taking these, so I'll just stick with this shot and be done with it. The drawback to our house is that the 2 kids' bedrooms are on the small side, so in order to maximize space, I've eliminated dressers and use the closets to their fullest potential. I bought this hanging organizer from the Lillian Vernon website on clearance for $10. I keep Garrett's underwear in the top slot, his socks in the second slot, miscellaneous stuff in the third slot and then his shoes go in the smaller slots. Most of them are empty right now because most of his shoes are on the floor of the laundry room where we also tend to keep our shoes that we wear frequently. In the basket on the shelves in the middle is where I keep Garrett's pj's. The shelf below that are a couple of Garrett's throw blankets. Being a former elementary school teacher, I have a ton of kids books. Garrett would get them all out at once and make a mess if he could, so that's why the 2 top shelves have books on them. Inside the closet and to the left, is a small, plastic organizer with more books on it that he can reach. His hamper sits next to it. To the right, inside the closet, is one of those blow-up punching bags that stands about 4 feet tall, and a wagon full of Mega blocks. All along the top shelf are baskets of toys, a container of sheets that fit Garrett's bed, a box of memorabilia that I've saved so far for Garrett, and a container for Thomas and his train tracks.
And that is the tour of Garrett's new bedroom along with my attempts of organizing him and his stuff. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I'll be able to post something similar from Cooper's room. Today, I put the mattress in the crib. I think the only thing left to do is to hang the curtain, vacuum, then move all the furniture where it belongs and hang everything on the walls and it will be finished. I organized his closet last week. It's a little more chaotic than Garrett's because of the baby equipment and baby toys that will be stored in there until needed. With Garrett, we didn't get a lot of that stuff until he needed it (like a potty chair), but now we have to have some place to store it and his closet is the most convenient one.

Tomorrow I have yet another doctor's appointment, so I'll post about that later along with my Mother's Day. It's been wonderful and my husband bought me an awesome gift!