Boys' Room: the Dresser

Since the boys share a pretty small room, organization is constantly at war with clutter.  It drives me nuts.  So, over the last couple of months I have been working on a huge purge.  I wanted all toys to have a home, all books to have a shelf and all clothes to fit in drawers.  This purge was accelerated by my younger son's move to a big-boy bed.  At that point, I had to find space in a closet to store the crib and mattress.  We don't exactly have tons of room.  After selling the boys' small dresser, the glider (since we aren't currently rocking any babies) and some miscellaneous stuff we weren't using and then donating a bunch more stuff, our whole place feels better.  This has allowed me to do some redecoration in the boys' room.  The first and most important thing we needed was a new dresser.  I wanted something vertical that would actually fit all of their clothing with some room to spare.  I didn't have a huge budget so off to Ikea I went with my sister (we love rendezvous at Ikea, it's our hang-out).  I chose the Hopen.  I'm a fan of modern, simple furniture.  Dark stained wood is not my favorite, but it only came in one color, so I decided to work with it and chose black/white as the base of the color scheme in the room.

I wanted to do some sort of travel-theme because I found an old London Underground map to frame, but I was lacking that extra bit of inspiration - that thing to push me into action.  Then I chanced across some vinyl decals on one of those deal-a-day websites and voila! there it was, and the whole room began to come together in my head.  The decals just happened to be the right size to adhere to the front of the dresser.  Since pretty much all of the furniture in the room is from Ikea, I wanted to find some way of making it unique or at the very least, less-ubiquitous.  I am SO happy with how it turned out.  I had been having some serious crafting-fails recently (more on that later) and it felt great to have a success!  Applying these decals was amazingly easy - unbelievably easy - I tell you anyone could do it.  I would definitely do this sort of thing again.  So, the room continues to come together!