I really wanted Roman shades for this room because of the abundance of windows. Blinds would have looked meh and traditional drapery wouldn’t have made sense with this setup. I wanted an easy way to enjoy the sunshine by day and then definitively block it for bedtime so our son wouldn’t awaken us at 6 a.m. daily. (It turns out that we love our children more when they don’t jump onto our sleeping bodies at the crack of dawn. Go figure.)

I looked into purchasing Roman shades and nearly passed away when I priced them out for nine individual windows. It was ridiculously expensive. So my mom offered to make them.

We chose this herringbone pattern from the Joel Dewberry Modern Meadow collection.

She looked up instructions online and set to work. She’s a handy lady and quite the seamstress, but I think she would describe this as one of the most frustrating home improvement projects she has ever undertaken, and has vowed to never attempt a Roman shade again. (For that reason, I am not posting a how-to because she was dissatisfied with the directions she found online and ended up improvising in a way that only befits an experienced sewer.) That said, they look amazing and totally professional and she saved us a ton of money. In return, we vow to never put her in a nursing home.

Here’s the end result, in both open and closed positions.

You can also see the small fan we installed over the bed area. I needed a small-ish fixture, but this one was even teenier than I realized. I was feeling unsure about it until my son saw it and said, “Oh, I love the propeller light!” Done. Now I just pretend that was my plan all along.

So the first thing we had to do throughout the entire house was update the wiring, which included massive tear-outs of the plaster. It was a huge mess, and we hired electricians. (Electrical work is like a siren song to Andy — he can’t resist it, and it always ends badly. So our new agreement is that we hire professionals for all electrical work. Unless he wants to up his life insurance, in which case, I’m open to it.) We also had the electricians add overhead lights to the bedrooms while they were at it.

Then we had to figure out what to do about the setup of the radiators. (Pictured below).

The wood was somewhat warped, and we didn’t want to leave the radiators exposed anyway because our sons don’t have any sense and would happily touch blazing sources of heat with their bare hands. Repeatedly. Andy decided to build his own radiator cover, which also meant that the only feasible thing to do was paint the woodwork.

A word about that before we proceed, because I know people get really uppity about painted wood. Here’s the thing: We couldn’t match the existing wood or stain to the radiator frame. Portions of the woodwork in the room had been pieced in over the years and were comprised of different stains and varieties of wood. And white trim just looks really good. Our compromise was to leave the doors in their natural wood state, but to paint the trim.

Here is the view into the room after the wall and trim are both painted. (This process included night after night of painting the trim white, followed by night after night of painting the walls. We listened to a lot of NPR podcasts. We’ve never been more informed.)

After that was done, Andy focused on building the radiator covers. We bought metal sheeting from Home Depot (we chose this cloverleaf pattern) and painted it the same white as the trim. Here are the sheets hanging to dry in the basement:

He also had to build support frames for the covers, which had to be removable so that we could access the radiators for maintenance. The solution was this design below. The back wall shows a completed frame; the right wall shows a frame in progress.

Each frame is screwed into a wooden block (there are three separate segments, one for each wall). The frames can be easily popped off to access the radiators when necessary, but are screwed into the place the rest of the time.

Here are the completed radiator covers, wall paint and white trim below. (With the tools of the trade scattered around for authenticity.)

The room we designated for our older son, age 5, was the former master bedroom in the house. (The current master was the result of an addition in 1988.) It has a lot of vintage charm, including a sun-filled room that was an addition sometime in the 1940s, plus a huge closet and an en-suite bathroom. Not a bad deal for a kindergartner.

Here’s what the room looked like at the start:

This is the view facing into the room from the doorway. (The bathroom door is on the right.)

Here’s a closer view of the sleeping area. Note the vintage window dressings. We think these were from the 1950s or 1960s. They were really something.

And here’s the view of the main area of the bedroom. (The closet doors are on the left in the photo below; my younger son is on the right. Watching my phone. Because I am a bad mother.)

Next step? Fixing the wiring, then painting, painting and more painting. Stay tuned.