A black room for the kids
Though most people (including me! ;)) know me as someone who loves bright and bold colors, I've been dreaming about the idea of a black wall in the house for a while. A black wall combined with lots of bright colors, that is. I was fantasizing about a black wall in the dining room, combined with like a bright yellow or green table, or a wooden table with chairs in lots of colors, but I didn't really think what I had in mind would work in our current dining area, so that idea has to wait for a future new home.
Then the plan to change some rooms in the house came up: we wanted Rosa and the new baby to have a large room together, so we decided to move Helmut's study to Rosa's small room and make the larger study into a room for Rosa and the baby. I thought maybe this would be the moment to try the black wall, but I hesitated a bit: black in the kids room, isn't that a bit of a no-go? Don't they always tell you that babies and young kids should be surrounded by soft, sweet new-agey tones in order to develop into mentally healthy human beings?
But then I thought about something that would make the black wall not just a fun style experiment for their mama, but also a playful extra for the kids (and not just something that would cause them nightmares ;)): painting the wall with black chalk board paint. Drawing on the wall always seemed fun to me, and maybe the possibility to draw on the wall from her bed would even keep Rosa in bed slightly longer in the mornings...
I vaguely remembered that I once pinned something like I had in mind on my children's rooms pinterest board, and yes, these images from the Finnish blog Koulun lattia narisee convinced me even more that I really liked this combination of black & bright for a children's room.
So a little while ago we started emptying Helmut's super stuffed study -a place I've probably never ever shown here because it was such an uninteresting place (that is, for those of us interested in interiors, maybe not for those of us interested in huge collections of cds and dvds ;)) and then we painted the wall, and this weekend it was finally time to move all the furniture from the one room to the other and show Rosa her new place.
From the first moment, she was very much intrigued by the new room and she immediately started playing there enthusiastically (in fact the only moment she had looked a bit puzzled was when her yellow bed was standing in the living room for a while during the process of moving all the furniture!).
Actually going to sleep in her new room seemed a bit more of a challenge at first...
But who would be that keen to go to sleep when she could draw on the walls as well?
The room still needs lots of decoration to be done, and I already noticed that that's a whole different story now compared to when I decorated Rosa's first nursery. Back then I could do whatever I liked, knowing that it would take quite some time till Rosa would be physically able to make actual changes to the room. Now I wanted her to really be involved in the process of making the new room her own, so we did the decoration together, which in fact meant that I put something somewhere, and then Rosa would pick it up and put it somewhere else again ;). Ah well, it's her room! (I must do my 'one-day-perfect-decoration' and take some pictures of it once, when she's at daycare ;))
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