A Kids Bedroom Alongside Map Wallpaper & Bunk Beds

…in his bedroom. Well, most of it. Here is Emma’s hilarious letter about the makeover they turned out for their son’s room:

We moved in to this three-storey 1876 “brownstone” (sidebar: it is neither made of brownstone nor located in New York City) three years ago – we are in Ontario, Canada. We have been working our way through the house converting what was four separate apartments back into a single home. This bedroom is up on the third floor and it belongs to our 5-yr old son, Angus. The ‘Before’ photos were taken when we first looked at the house and, at the time, this bedroom was the living room of a medical student at the University nearby.

When we at last got our hands on it and wrapped up some necessities in the rest of the house – like a working kitchen and toilet – we chose that (a) the room needed closets and (b) it should be out-of-the-park excellent so that he’ll never leave home and will look after us when we are old and cannot find our false teeth (sidebar #2: we will re-visit this plan when he is 16 and takes up the drums, or when he is married and his spouse does not want to sleep on a bunk). Enter the built-in bunk bed loft, which my husband made while I helpfully pointed out where things did not line up.

We were going for a campy/beach club look and he brought in in the cedar shake roof to make it feel like a real playhouse… or perhaps a crab shack…

I was dying to try this map wallpaper after seeing it online. In fact, I think I impulse-ordered it well before we had even moved in to the house. We had heard a few times that wallpapering is a real relationship tester, so we armed ourselves with a bucket of paste and few glasses of wine late one night once the children were asleep. The wall was not quite big sufficient for the whole earth, so the most nerve-wracking part was deciding which parts of the world to leave out (sidebar #3: our son is going to be floored when he discovers the existence of remarkable places like ‘New Zealand’, ‘Fiji’ and ‘Alaska’).

This room was so much lively to do. Hope you folks like it! -Emma J.

Angus is a lucky guy, right? I think Emma has as good a shot as any of us at keeping her kid around forever. You can see more pics and learn more about the makeover right here on her journal. Thanks Emma!