Room de-do: Storage room to bedroom in 2 months

Up until a few months ago, my daughter Cody had been living in Ohio for over a year and I was really missing her.
She was missing Kansas City too, and last February she asked if she could move in with Tim and I while she gets on her feet.

This is my favorite recent pic of Cody. She's 21 now (unbelievable!):

Our house only has 2 bedrooms upstairs. Of course, Tim and I are in one of them and we have a 23 year old taking residency in the other (my youngest son). The only place we could put Cody is in the little bedroom downstairs that Tim had built. I've been using the room as a storage room for several years and it was FULL!!
Cody wanted to come in about 6 weeks. I had a lot of work to do in a short time.

Not only was this room cram-packed with "stuff", but the walls were painted red.

The reason the walls were red was because Tim's son Patrick was going to move into this room when we first bought the house about 4 years ago. He chose red for his wall color, so Tim painted red.
In the end, Patrick decided not to move in, and the room became my storage room. I never bothered to paint over the red walls, so it's been red for a while now.

It's not a very big room, it's about 10' X 12'

So I went to work emptying the storage room.
I really didn't have anywhere to move all of this stuff, so I sorted, purged, gave stuff away, and made a garage sale pile.
It took about 3 weeks to empty the room.
- The blurry pics came from my iphone-

And then it was time to cover up that red paint!
It took about 4 coats of Kilz to cover the red completely.

And now for some color!
The rest of our house is decorated in earth tones, but someone had given us some dark blue carpet squares. We wanted to use them because they were free. We decided to go with a light blue color for the walls. (the football-looking thing on the floor is just an old sign we use for a painting dropcloth)

Such a difference with the blue walls!

We really felt that since this was a basement room, we needed to perk it up with even more color. We didn't want it to feel like a basement room.

Tim and I took a trip to Target and picked out this bedding set for Cody. We bought her the pink sheets too!

Then I took one of the colored pillowcases to Michael's Arts & Crafts and I bought some craft paints that matched the colors in the bedding.

I used these colors to paint the duct work on the ceiling.
The really dark color is purple. It came out a little dark in these pics.

The pole and the ductwork trim pieces are bright pink, the same color as the sheets we bought for Cody's bed.

I spent about 2 weeks painting the room. Four coats of Kilz, three coats of blue. I put coats of paint on before work in the mornings, after work, and at all hours of the night. I spent A LOT of time in that room.

The whole family pitched in to help. Here is my son Allen putting a coat of paint on the back of Cody's door.

Finally, the painting was done, and we went to work laying the carpet.
Here is my son Chris laying carpet.

Then came the fun part! The decorating!
This time I took the pillowcase Joanne Fabric & Crafts and I bought some coordinating material.
I wanted to make some throw pillows for her bed, curtains for the ugly window, and a curtain to cover up the "closet". You can see the closet in the pictures above.

Really, the closet is just a gaping hole that leads to a small area under the stairs. There is a light in there and a bar to hang clothes, so technically it really is a closet.
Its a creepy closet though, and I didn't think Cody would want to put her things in there. Tim doesn't want to cover up the entrance to the closet with drywall because the closet is what qualifies this basement room to actually be a 3rd bedroom in our home. (Before Tim built this bedroom, it had been an open area that was  part of our giant laundry room. More on that in another post).
In the end I used a big piece of the pink material to make a curtain for the closet opening. Right now I'm storing our coolers and suitcases in there. The bright pink curtain sure adds more color to the room.

For her closet, Cody is using the white cabinets that were already in the room. Here is a pic of the cabinets (there are 2 of them in the room)

I'll be back with the pictures of how Cody's room looks now that it's finished, or mostly finished. We still have a few decorating details to add.

It turned out to be a really nice little bedroom for Cody. She's been here 2 months and she LOVES her room!