Since we are actively trying to sell our house a challenge I’ve had in anticipation of this baby is how to do a fun decoration project. Nothing ruins the re-sale neutrality of a house than a heavily painted-custom room. And I wanted to make a super fun individualized room for the kiddos. Second part of my problem was $$. At this point in our lives we have very little and usually nothing in the home decoration part of the budget.

So, the Challenge was, make the kids room of my dreams on next to nothing of a budget. Not only create a kids room with enough color, fun and imagination to be the perfect play area but make it to where it can be dismantled with very little effort.

Enter the *inspiration* I read about using fabric as wallpaper for apartment dwellers who are not allowed to use paint or real wallpaper. It seemed like pure genius. Fabric starched to the walls. I had lots of odds and ends of fabric that could be used. That was doable. Then a recipe for homemade cornstarch was discovered using the cheapest cornstarch available at my local store.

$3 container of powdered Cornstarch = enough cornstarch to make gallons worth of fabric starch.

This is the recipe I used.

Homemade Fabric Starch

Mix 1/4 c.  corn starch into 1/2 c. cold water
Stir in 4 c. of boiling water
Mix and cool. Stir or shake well before use.

This starch mixture goes much further than one might think it would. Even when dealing with large sections of fabric. Speaking of fabric phase two was locating fabric cheap enough to meet the second part of my criteria. A trip to Goodwill yielded some amazing finds in the form of old sheets, sections of fabric donated and tableclothes all at 50% off of the already quite reasonable Goodwill prices.

Here are some of the selections I made. All of the pieces were obtained for $1 or less.

Fabric destined for "girl" side of room as a wall border

Old faded sheet with beautiful butterflies

Brown tablecloth destined for tree creation

So, before I show what I did you need to see the room in it’s “before” state. The room was previously the Doodlebugs exlusively so part of what needed to happen was to make it a gender neutral play area.

Doodlebugs bedroom before Transformation into Kids Playroom

The pink alcove had to go. So the Doodlebug and I decided to transform it into a sky-blue and also paint the sloping ceiling parts the matching blue for the sky.

Doodlebug helping to paint the alcove sky blue

Finished "Sky" areas in the room

I bought a couple of containers of sample sized brown paint from Lowe’s on clearance for $0.50 apiece. Although I was nervous I decided to free hand a couple of trees on the far end of the room. I figured if it was a total failure I could re-paint over it with the leftover green paint we had from when the room was originally painted.

Not having any experience painting murals free handed or otherwise I just went with it and was thankful that the trees came together well. The idea for these trees was that they would be “name” trees for both kids.

Start of Caleb's Tree

Start of Doodlebugs Tree

Skeleton of two Name trees

I bought plain wooden letters for the kids names from Hobby Lobby and painted them with cheap craft paint.

Noelle's painted letters

Caleb's Wooden letters

Noelle's finished name tree

Caleb's name tree

Next phase was alllll about the fabric. I didn’t want to risk custom painting any other parts of the room since it would be too much work to have to paint over it. One wall is easy enough to re-paint but the whole room just seemed overwhelming.

See part 2 to find out how amazingly creative and awesome fabric decorations can be. 🙂