Interior Design: Playroom

Amy's an artist.
Always has been.

She was just a kid when she started drawing on my walls. I remember a little house sketched next to the light switch in her bedroom, and some crayon designs on the closet door. A few years later she painted life-sized stick figure kids playing on our basement walls, complete with flowers and trees. It was darling!

The other day she arrived at my door with brushes, masking tape and a few cans of paint. "Want your Christmas present early?" she asked. "I'm here to paint the Cousin's Clubhouse."

That's what the grandkids named the closet under the stairs when they recognized its possibilities. I hung a full-length mirror at the back (next to a basket of dress-ups) and tucked in a toy train, but it still needed some personality.

Amy brought it! Keeping with our travel motif, she sketched a scene from Amsterdam, then taped off the buildings with masking tape and painted every other one. When the second coat was dry, she removed the tape from one building and re-taped its neighbor, so the colors wouldn't blend at the edges.

She cleaned up her gear and left it to dry overnight.

The next day she came back with black markers to add some details, and outline the buildings freehand, in her trademark style. Her girls inspected the work, and gave it high marks.

Tile corkboards were set in the painted frames, and members of the Cousins Club took their place on the official roster. The moral of my story is this:

Let your kids draw on the walls.
It's good practice!