Over the next few months, I will be writing a few posts on decorating a brightly colored toddler room. My daughter will be three come April and will be moving from the nursery into a big girl room. The first project I decided to tackle was her new bed. I have had a 1970s era bookcase headboard bed in storage for quite some time. My husband hauled it out of the deep recesses of the basement for me so I could get to work.

It started out a basic, dirty, honey-stained piece (Fig 1). I cleaned the entire piece well, including the side rails and the footboard. I then lightly sanded all of the pieces and wiped it down one final time with some tack cloth. I took my can of semi gloss white paint and set to work applying three total coats to all of the pieces with a 3-inch trim roller and a small trim brush. I only did one coat of white to the inside bookcase area because I wanted to paint the book nooks in different colors that will be used in the room.

After all of my white dried, I painted the book nooks with a bright green, blue and orange. The finished product is a modern, clean and fun headboard for my daughter (Fig 2).

The next piece of furniture I will redo is another piece from the 1970′s, my husband’s old desk.