saving on renovations

Because our house in a constant state of needing work, we are constantly spending money on little things. These little things added up, cost a lot. For instance, two years ago, we divided our huge bedroom into two rooms. Putting up the wall was a wise investment, and it turns out that papering only one side of the new room in wallpaper that could be painted over was a wise investment too. When Samuel was born, all we did was paint over the pale pink wallpaper with white paint (donated by grandma), and paper the unpapered wall in blue wallpaper. This time, when choosing wallpaper, I opted for a sturdy paper which was a bit more expensive than ordinary paper, but which I think will last a lot longer in that bedroom as it's a far cry from the childish wallpaper we first put on Joel's walls. This wallpaper is sturdy and elegant and if all goes well, I think we won't have to paper those walls again until Samuel's around ten years old.



With Samuel's room looking like a room out of a catalogue, it was impossible to leave Joel Jan's room unattended to. His room still had those little bears we'd hung up when he was a baby...and the wallpaper definitely needed changing. While I would have loved to indulge my eldest son and give him wall to wall paper in a train theme, I thought of four years from now when he would be close to puberty and the wall to wall trains would seem too childish...and decided to create a simple but effective train theme that I hoped he would enjoy much better and much longer.



We ended up deciding on white walls with a broad blue stripe flanked by shelves in bright yellow (blue and yellow are the colors of the National Spoorwegen). Instead of buying stuff new from the shops, we decided to go surfing on a place called Marktplaats.



We wanted a high bed for Joel in a metal color, and when we typed in "hoogslaper" (highsleeper), Marktplaats gave us a row of sellers in the nearby area. We found ourselves buying a bed in the exact model we wanted for about sixty percent less than what we would have paid for in the shops. The plus factor here was when my husband went to pick up the bed, he found out that the bed had been used for only a year, and when it arrived here, it looked like it had come out of the shop.