Create your own indoor camping snooze haven for your kidlets

In our neck of the woods, it has been hot outdoors — which means lots of swimming and sweating and indoor projects. We have been tackling our boys’ rooms this past week, moving the two big boys together in their “camping” room and the baby to his own nursery. We did very little to the boys’ rooms when we first moved in last year, so as fun as it is for them to get new rooms, I think it is actually more fun for me to get something interesting on those walls and give the space a bit of personality.

Our boys are constantly making tents and forts. Since my husband Alex built a fort for the them, it was my turn to make the tents. Well, when I say make, I say that quite loosely. I came up with the ideas and did the sewing and painting, but Alex was the one who made the tents.

The tents are made from cheap pine, but I painted them out to look like redwood and match the dressers in the room. The base coat is salmon, the second coat is a light brown and the final coat was a metallic bronze that was applied on edges and around the hardware and then rubbed in. The paint is rubbed in instead of just sprayed on to give a woodstain effect instead of straight paint.

After painting out the wood (while chasing my one-year-old around the yard with paint covered hands — WHY do I not wear gloves?!), I cut up some plaid shirts and a giant plaid Snuggy I picked up for a few bucks at the thrift store. I cut out the pockets and button strips for trimming.

I was very choosy when it came to the shirts I picked. They could be no more than $2, solid, thick heavy plaids with no pilling, and in the color scheme. I shot for the men’s section in the biggest sizes possible to get the most fabric, and ended up getting everything I needed to finish the tents including wood, paint and fabric for around $10. I ended up using a little canvas fabric and a bit of a blue blanket I had at home, but ended up with enough leftover material from the Snuggy to make an extra blanket.

The big green chalkboard started life as the bottom piece for a crib. Then IKEA dumped it in the as-is section and I jumped at a strong board with pre-drilled holes and linear dividers. After a coat of chalkboard spray paint and a few hooks and knobs I had waiting to be used for something, the kiddos now have a designated spot for backpacks, lunchboxes and hats.

This is the other tent — as I said, the shirts were all patchworked together, so the tents don’t match. They do coordinate:

Here’s the view from the inside!

There’s a debate in our house as to whether those are trees or mountains on the wall — no one seems to know. I asked my husband and he shrugged. So I asked the kids, who asked where the tree trunks were if they were supposed to be trees. At the moment, I’m kind of liking the happy medium of neither mountain nor tree, but kind of both.