Decor for Philo's Room

I'm a total geek when it comes to decorating rooms. I love it. I must have a strong nesting urge or something because whenever I move into a new place I start arranging the furniture and figuring out a color scheme immediately. I love taking a blank apartment and making it feel like my home.

I'm getting anxious to start playing around with Philo's bedroom. Granted, I don't have much to put in it, but I want to get in there and start getting an idea of space and where things will go. I also want to start storing the baby things we've purchased...whenever we go to Target we hit up the baby aisle for clearance items, and I've already bought a few big things, like my breast pump and my cloth diaper set. I can't wait to get started rearranging things.

Unfortunately, there's one catch...the room that will be Philo's currently belongs to Mike. It's his office. And it is full. You can't even see the floor because he has so much stuff in there. The walls are lined with shelves and container units and for further storage he has three bookcases, two file cabinets, a desk, and a rolling toolbox. And it's a small room, too. Mike moved his computer desk into the living room to make space in the office, and he occasionally transfers his stuff into plastic storage boxes so they can go into the basement. However, you'd need about twenty storage bins to store the contents of Mike's office, and since I'd rather not spend $200 on storage boxes we look around and get them on clearance. However, they aren't on clearance constantly, so we find some on sale, buy a few, he packs a few things, and then we wait a month to find them on sale again. It's slow going, and I'm incredibly frustrated.

Yesterday I decided to temporarily satisfy the nesting urge by making something for Philo's room. I read a LiveJournal entry written by a woman who painted a mural for her son's room. Painting a mural doesn't make sense in a rented apartment, but I really wanted to paint a few pictures for his room.

Now, I don't paint. I doodle, but I wanted something more impressive than just pencil sketches. So Mike and I went to Michael's yesterday and bought some acrylic paint, brushes, and a few small canvases so I could try my hand at painting a few pictures.

Mike and I are decorating the baby's room in Classic Pooh. It was Mike's idea, actually, because he has a fondness for Piglet. I like it too because it's gender neutral so we won't be buying a bunch of stuff if we ever have another kid. Because everything we registered for is sort of green and pastel I decided to paint four colorful pictures of Classic Pooh characters.

Here are my pictures. Also, thrill to the sight of my horribly maintained windowsills. Way to keep up the property, landlord!


Oh, poor Eeyore. If only the ear on the near side of his head was bigger. But I had to mix the blue for his body, and so I can't really paint over the ear and re-paint because I'll never match the blue to paint over it. This is the first one I did.


Tigger! His stripes needed a second coat of brown.

Mike's favorite guy, Piglet.


And Pooh Bear. Classic Pooh as a weird, pointy snout that Disney Pooh doesn't have, and it's sort of weird to me. But there we go.

I'll hang them where people can't get too close to look closely, but at least they'll provide some color spots on the wall. Now we just need to empty out that office so I can hang them up.