The Compleat And Actual Adventures of Marcella White Campbell

My daughter watches and loves Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. It’s my fault; I had a brief obsession with the show and communicated it to her. A needy family is chosen to receive a completely new house in a single week. The reveal, when the widowed foster mother of twelve/ preschool teacher/ top fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity/lupus sufferer sees her five-bedroom, three-story house for the first time, has made me cry an embarrassing quantity of times.

Anyhow, I thought it would be fun to do an Extreme Makeover: Room Edition for my daughter’s tenth birthday. How hard could it be? It was only one bedroom, after all, and I wasn’t going to replace everything. I’d sew a quilt, I reasoned (her birthday was months away at this point). I’d paint her old, graffito-ed raw wood desk. I’d buy some shelving and a new rug and do something to the walls. And I’d do the bulk of it on her birthday, while she was at school.

Several communicable illnesses later (you know, the kind that pass back and forth between the germiest members of the family and the oldest, frailest ones) I found myself five days away from her birthday, with three-quarters of a quilt top and nothing else.

So I went into Extreme Makeover mode.

1) Overindulgent grand (and great-grand) parents are happy to subsidize tenth birthday makeovers. They are even willing to pay for rush shipping.

2) I spent a deeply unpleasant afternoon at IKEA picking up bright accent pieces.

3) Later that same afternoon, I bought an organizer at Target, which was the first phase of the remodel.

4) Exhausted by IKEA + Target, I didn’t really step up my game again until the following Sunday, when we started the process of making milk paint for the desk. It’s nontoxic and produces no fumes, so I could paint right in her room without moving things around too much. I also sanded the desk and filled ten years’ worth of holes and gouges with wood filler, then sanded that down too.

5) The following Monday, I mixed up the milk paint and discovered that Martha Stewart’s milk paint recipe is a LIE. I had a total of about six ounces of (admittedly pretty) green milk paint. In the end, I barely had enough to stain the wood: full paint coverage was out of the question, not to mention painting the drawers. I decoupaged those with American Crafts papers that, yes, I had lying around the house.

6) While I was already covered in Mod Podge, I decoupaged her old IKEA bedside table, too.

At this point, my daughter thought I was done with her birthday present. I smiled pityingly. (Pitying myself.)

7) The day of her birthday, I sent her off to school, got caffeinated, and cued This American Life on my iPod. I cleaned her room (this is frankly the part that took the longest), replaced her old IKEA bed slats, changed her sheets to new bright chartreuse ones, and set up the bright IKEA accents (such as the trash can pictured above, next to the bedside table).

8) I covered the walls and ceiling with Pottery Barn Teens Bubble Dot Decals. I only needed one package, as it turned out, which was a relief. Borrowing a design tip from PB Teens, I also added a package of Bubble Dot Mirrors as accents.

9) Pottery Barn sells a wall set of large square components — pegboards, dry erase boards and the like. They are $30 per square. I got the skateboarding fabric board on clearance for $10 and bought a perfectly sized dry erase board from Target for $8.

I had to drill into the drywall. Gah.

10) When she arrived home on her birthday, she was surprised, in that she entered her room, stood in silence for several seconds, and then began to giggle uncontrollably, twirling in circles. BUT I WAS STILL NOT DONE. OH NO.

11) Two days after her birthday, the FLOR (modular carpet) arrived, and I spent far too long designing the perfect pattern. (I don’t get obsessed with the minutia of enormous projects, thank goodness.) Note: FLOR offers a fun online design tool that stops being fun after the first 45 minutes.

12) The same day, I decided to power through and just turn the quilt into a duvet cover. (Internet Truth Alert: I still haven’t made the ties to close the duvet cover yet. I know, I am a terrible person.)

13) Step 13: Profit!

The main problem with this room makeover is that now the rest of our house looks like a dingy hovel. It is like my daughter’s room is the Edwardian manor lady’s room and we are all sculleries living in the walls, but at least Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson play us in the movie version of our lives (?).

So of course for my birthday (which is less than two weeks away) we are going to do Extreme Makeover: No One Is Subsidizing My Birthday Room Makeover So It Is Going To Be Super Lame And Mostly Consist Of Sewing Another Duvet Cover Edition! Happy Birthday To Me!