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Disclaimer: Gus isn’t actually a teen yet. He’s 12 1/2. But Teen/Tween Boys’ Room is too unwieldy for the title. Also, in six months I will have THREE TEEN BOYS! Ack!

I feel a little weird about this room reveal….as if I cheated or something because it’s so relatively spare and minimalist. Normally when I do a room reveal there are about 3000 pictures, because there’s always more stuff  to show you! But Milo and Gus’s room just seemed to want to be simple. Clean lines, some empty space, no clutter.

I should point out that Milo and Gus are 12 and almost 15 year old boys, and I’m sure the clutter will come in time. They still have a ton of space on those shelves at the end of the beds, and eventually there’ll be an update post where I show you whatever ends up happening on those. They have a bunch of stuff in their closets that got put away while we were doing the floors, and I’ve asked them a couple of times if they wanted to go through it all and find stuff to put out on the shelves….but so far they haven’t. I think they’re enjoying the strange feeling of having a clean room, too.

Right now the only thing going on on the shelves is book housing:

The wardrobes on the ends of the beds are where we’re keeping dirty laundry baskets and extra shoes, and I am so glad to have an out of sight place for dirty laundry baskets.

Here’s what the room used to look like:

The forest room was a really cool space for them for awhile. We hung up that wall mural almost as soon as we moved in. They loved those hanging chairs, and spend countless hours reading in them. I’m actually having a hard time battling nostalgia as I write this post. My boys are SO BIG.

So big that they don’t play with legos anymore. So big that they both wanted a desk to draw and do school and play computer games at. So big that they don’t even NEED stuffed beagles on their beds anymore. Sniff, sniff.

It was time for an update. The challenge: take a relatively small (about 12 x 12) room and make it more functional and spacious for two big kids to share for the foreseeable future (Ari will likely be off to college in another year, so things might shift then…but I want to make sure he has his own space to come home to summers and holidays, too. Ideally we’ll be able to finish the basement and have a bedroom and bathroom down there eventually. Ideally).

 

Here’s the original moodboard we came up with for the room:

 

We started with the beds and pretty much designed the room around them, both space and style-wise. I knew that loft beds were pretty much the only way we were going to get two beds and two desks into this space, but our 8′ ceilings aren’t compatible with a lot of the loft beds out there. We thought about building some ourselves, but then we spotted the Stuva beds at Ikea and, after some measuring, decided they would work well. And then I found a pair of them on Craigslist and we snatched them right up.

And if we were going to assemble these very big beds in the room, we needed to redo the floors first. I’ve wanted to rip the carpet up ever since we moved in, and we knew we didn’t want to have to take the beds apart again down the road to do it. This whole room makeover might really have been an elaborate scheme to give us an excuse to get rid of some carpet. We put down bamboo in here, a little darker than what we’d originally planned. I love, love, love that the carpet is gone, and I can’t wait until it’s gone everywhere in the house:

The walls are painted Benjamin Moore’s Old Navy. We’re well on the way to having nothing but blue rooms in this house. I am okay with that.

Now that they had desks, they needed chairs. And they really wanted spinny office chair type chairs, so I ordered these from Overstock, and everyone is very happy with them. I love how they look, and they love scooting across the floor in them:

I was originally thinking we’d need a big rug in here, but I tried a 5 x 7 and even that was too big for the available space. So we ended up with this 4 x 5.5 one from Target. The kids thought they didn’t want a rug at all, but now that it’s in there they’re happy with it because the dogs like it so much:

The saucer chairs are also from Target. They’re Pillowfort chairs, so intended for kids. The weight limit is 150 pounds, and right now Milo still has 25 pounds to go before he’s too big. Eventually we might need to upgrade, but these were the right price, and Milo and Gus both liked them (we tried out some beanbag chairs, and they weren’t happy with them). I was also just getting to the point where I wanted to call this room finished already! Like with the rug, the kids thought they didn’t need chairs in here, but I wasn’t quite ready to go that minimalist. And now that they’re in there, they’re happy to have them and they get used a lot for reading and just hanging out.

I tried really hard to get decent pictures of this side of the room, and especially of those Harry Potter posters, but…windows.

The Harry Potter posters are from Nest Art Print’s Etsy shop, and we’re all very happy with them. There are a bunch of different designs to choose from, so I more or less turned Milo and Gus loose and let them pick. Although I did offer suggestions. I do wish I’d gotten better frames for them; these are just cruddy plastic ones from Michaels, and it’s bothering me more than I expected. We’ll upgrade someday.

And the only other thing hanging on the wall right now is the impulse buy letterboard from Target.

Milo and Gus were overwhelmed by the responsibility of coming up with something to put on the board, so I had to do it for them. It’s a quotation from Gregory Maguire’s Egg and Spoon, which I read aloud to the older kids awhile back. It’s also kind of an ironic choice for someone who’s currently freaking out because she’s only about halfway through making her exhaustively detailed day by day itinerary for her summer road trip. But perhaps the letterbox quotation will give me wisdom. Or maybe I should change it to “Sleeping in a parking lot because you can’t get a campground reservation anywhere begins with not knowing what comes next” instead. My only complaint about the letterbox is that it come with only two Ws and I had to steal one from the kit I bought Ari. Seriously, Target? There are so many words with Ws. Why would you want to withhold Ws from your weary and woebegone customers?

Eventually I want to put something like a magnetic white board over their desks so they can hang artwork and draw and whatever, but for now the desks just have these lamps (also Target) and not a lot else on them (except for Gus’s butterfly drawing in his sketchbook. Gus is suddenly really into drawing, and it makes me very happy):

And that’s it! That’s all there is, because now I’m a minimalist! Okay, probably just for this room, really. But you never know. I mean, I don’t know anyway, because I’m embracing the idea that adventure begins with not knowing what comes next in my house instead of on my travels. Although what comes next is likely either my downstairs bath or the dining room. But! Not until August, because we’re heading out for the summer soon.

(That’s not our dog. That’s my friend Tracy’s dog, Butler. We’re dog sitting. But, like all dogs, Butler loves the new rug).

 

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