Teen Martha started college this fall, but is living at home. This big change in her life necessitated a big change in her room as well. She was done, done, done with her room that had 2 pink walls and 2 purple walls. She was done with her purple comforter. She was done with the big desk unit that was designed for a giant monitor when she now has a laptop. She was done with the lime green Roman shades. She was fed up with the clutter.

Step one was decluttering. She packed tons of stuff away and emptied out lots of books. Her curio cabinet, which housed her collections of porcelain hinged boxes, miniature shoes and other items, was taken away. The desk was dismantled. The blinds came down.

The first step was painting. She wanted stripes. Oh my. We primed the walls with white (twice). Then we taped it off so we could do a pink stripe and a green stripe. We let it dry, did another coat, and removed that tape and taped again so that in between the two stripes was a white sparkle stripe (two coats there too). The painting took weeks with all the taping, untaping and numerous coats.

We found the duvet cover on Overstock which was a huge bargain given that it is Tommy Hilfiger. She wanted plain roller blinds to darken the room (Walmart) and found some gorgeous white see through nubby drapes at Target (you can’t see these very well in the photo so here’s the link to see them).

The desk is all Mr. MarthaAndMe. In the dark ages, Mr. MarthaAndMe used to own an office furniture repair company and he also at one point worked for an office furniture design firm. He still has contacts there and one of those took us up to the dusty, hot storage room where we found two desk tops and a pedestal which Mr. MarthaAndMe and his handy brother cut down to fit as an L shape in the space Teen Martha had available, with the pedestal as support.

On our summer trip, Teen Martha bought some Chinese lanterns in Vancouver, and those hang in the corners.

She decoupaged her light switch cover with clippings from magazines (it doesn’t look like it matches in the photo, but actually the colors are really spot on).

The room isn’t quite done. She still wants a desk lamp and wants to replace the rug by the bed and get a new office chair.

But I’m pretty proud of how well it turned out. The desk seems to be working well, giving her lots of space to spread out. All of this cost under $300.