When we were working on this room–for a very long time–Ari and I had a running joke where he insisted it needed a theme, like Abe’s National Parks room. “Are we ever going to finish my baseball-Star Wars-math room?” he’d ask.

There is not actually a theme.

And we took so long to finish that it’s sort of not even Ari’s room anymore. He’s away at college now, so Milo (who otherwise shares a room with Gus) actually sleeps in here except when Ari’s home for vacations. But even Milo is going away to college next year (!), so it will probably hang out being a room for whatever kid is home on vacation/a guest room for the foreseeable future. But we decorated it with Ari in mind (although with the fact that it would be used by Milo pretty often kept in mind). We still haven’t quite figured out the whole college kids and bedrooms situation fully.

So this post has been a long time in coming! Really, the room has been almost finished since last fall, but I held off taking pictures and posting until I got just one more thing–the rice paper art that’s hanging over the dresser there.

Here’s what Ari’s room used to look like:

It really was still totally fine, but then we put in new bamboo floors in his room, and that sort of unleashed the full makeover floodgates. Also change is fun! And it had been awhile. And I was really tired of the probably ill-conceived decision to paint all the trim brown (this was Martha Stewart’s fault. Back when they sold the Martha Stewart line of paint at Home Depot, every color came with a suggestion for coordinating trim color. “What a great idea!” I thought, when Martha suggested we paint all the woodwork difficult to paint over brown). It’s much easier to repaint trim when you have bamboo floors instead of carpet. EVERYTHING is better without carpet. IMHO.

So! Tour!

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The wall color is Benjamin Moore’s Salamander. It’s a very dark green that can look nearly black sometimes, and I love it. The rug is from Ikea by way of the thrift store.

Ari’s old bed was just a bed frame with boards screwed to the wall in place of a separate headboard. For the new room, we went with a simple, fairly inexpensive pine platform bed from Amazon. But it looked pretty bare above there with no headboard, so we added the Fibonacci wall! This a math thing (Ari’s a math major) that I will not attempt to explain, but basically that series of little rectangles (and big rectangles) above the bed is based on Fibonacci numbers and the golden spiral. I’ll write a separate post about it at some point wherein I’ll go into more mathy detail (likely with Dave’s help). We made it with lattice molding strips spray painted gold; very simple project, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

Ari has wanted room darkening curtains for a long time, and he finally got his wish, with these blackout curtain panels from Target. Then we paired them with these brass curtain rods. Now it gets SO DARK in there! I’m jealous. There might be some blackout curtains in my own room’s future.

The comforter is from TJ Maxx, I think, so long ago now that I can’t give you a link. I had a lot of more exciting ideas for the dresser, but none of them seemed to work out, so we ended up grabbing this super heavy oak thing from the thrift store. Someone had already painted it black and not terribly well, so ideally we’ll repaint it at some point. But then again we might not! It was cheap (I want to say around $30?) and fits in the space perfectly and holds a ton of clothes, so here it is.

Rice paper art! The last thing! I fretted for quite awhile about what to put in that giant space above the giant dresser, and finally ended up buying this rice paper shadow box art from World Market sort of impulsively one day. I wish it were a little bigger, but I really like it otherwise.

Heading to the other side of the room:

Wow–the wide angle lens makes that desk look insanely big! It’s big, but it’s not that big. We bought the base cabinets for the desk from Ikea and made the top out of stacked plywood. I posted about all that, umm…over a year ago here. And the shelves! I love these shelves, which we also finished quite awhile ago. I blogged about them here.

Oh! that Oakland cemetery print is new since I last posted about the shelves. I got it here.

Red chair and Portal 2 poster are some of the few carryovers from the old room.

Look! It’s Sandy Koufax. I got this for Ari for Christmas awhile back (on Etsy), and I think it might have started all the joking about the theme. But there is not actually a baseball theme in here, even though Ari likes baseball.

And I think that wraps up our tour of Ari/Milo’s new unthemed room!

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