Now that we’ve finally hung up those lights and added Milo and Gus’ room to the house tour, it seems only fair that we pay some attention to Ari’s room now. Because this is what has been going on in Ari’s room for the past several months:

Umm….I really hate painting trim. Can you tell? I pretty much wish we’d never started painting it at this point, but the thought of going back and repainting it all white is the only thing worse than going on and finishing the brown.

Here’s what happened: Ari’s room was the very first to be painted; I believe we finished it before we moved in. Before, it looked like this:

Not terrible, actually. You can’t see it in the picture, but each of the three non-stripey walls was painted in one of the colors from the stripes. So a dark green and a lighter green wall in addition to the beige-y one with the windows. But we told the kids they could pick their own paint colors, and Ari picked Martha Stewart’s Kerry Blue Terrier (fairly similar to what he picked out for his old room. Apparently he really likes blue gray). And that’s pretty great, because what 11 year old boy doesn’t want his room to look like a terrier? The Martha Stewart paint chips come with suggestions for a trim color, and the brown (Brook Trout)  is what Martha thought we should use. Ari was all for it, so we decided to go for it. And we did. For a little while one weekend many months ago. Then we got distracted and never made it back to finish. Bad parents. Poor Ari. So that’s where we are now.

And, while we’re at it, Ari’s whole room could use a little….tweenifying. We bought all of his furniture several years ago, and it’s due for some updating. And we’ve been meaning to get some stuff on his walls for quite awhile, too.

I told him I was going to go take pictures of his room for this post and asked him if it was clean. He assured me that it was. Well…not quite. I briefly contemplated neatening up a little for the pictures, but I was working with precious and limited baby naptime, so I figured I’d continue my embrace of realism and just make the before shots extra before. He’s actually a pretty tidy kid, and this is about as messy as his room generally gets.

My kid’s kind of weird. Likes skulls and baby doll heads:

Look: Ari’s room is one of the ones that came with an updated light fixture:

So where do we go from here? I’ve spent the past few days tossing ideas out to him to try to get a feel for what he might like. We found three things that my picky son definitively liked.

He’s into Japanese Anime and Japan stuff in general these days, so I did an Etsy search and came up with this print that he approved of: