A little advice, please

Jerry and I are in the throws of converting our guest bedroom into – not a nursery, but – Alex's new big boy room.

I have held out on pictures because, well, quite frankly, the room is a huge mess, and there is still a lot of work to be done. But I just can't help myself. Jerry has done such an amazing job of making our vision a reality. So if you're up for seeing the "during construction" phase of our progress, I'll let you have a sneak peek. Please excuse the mess.

Here's the BEFORE:

And here's where we are TODAY:

See? LOTS of work still left to do. Crown molding, shelves in the built-in book cases, knobs on the cabinet doors, a kickplate at the base of the built-ins, and on and on. I promise more pictures to come later when the room is cleared out of the power tools and lumber scraps and everything is ready to be primed and painted. And just in case you're wondering, all of the new wood work will be white.

Now that we're making progress on the changes to the room, I'm trying to pull together the bedding. And that's where I need your opinions.

This room will have two twin beds. (Because it will still be used as a guest bedroom when needed and because I'm preparing for the day when the boys will (hopefully) share a room - we'll be all set with the bedding.) And the one thing I've decided on for sure is that each bed will have this quilt on the foot of it and one of the shams. I've loved this star quilt for years, and I've decided to splurge and order it!

Each bed will also have a duvet. I loved the duvet on our guest bed. It's hard to tell from the photo below, but it is a navy/ivory ticking stripe. I got it off of ebay, and my words to Jerry when he placed the bid were, "You must win this. Period." And so I thought that navy ticking stripe would be (will be!) precious with this star quilt. The problem is, I have searched the internet over for twin size (any size for that matter) navy ticking stripe duvet covers, but to no avail.

So then I started looking for fabric because I have a friend here who said she'd whip me up the duvet covers if I find the fabric I want. Score! Turns out, the search for the fabric isn't as easy as one might think. But I do think I may have found some. Here it is.

The problem is that the price tag on this stuff is not cheap - especially when we're having to make two covers. Oh sure, they make some that's cheap, but let me tell you that I've ordered swatches, and the stuff isn't all that soft. Now, I'm big on soft bedding, and since this room will still be used as our guest quarters, I can't have bedding that feels like sandpaper. You know what I mean?

In the meantime, I was doing another needle-in-the-haystack search for navy ticking bedding/fabric/whatever-would-come-up, and I came across this. Finally! A possibility! One side has the navy ticking stripe and the other side has khaki and navy stripes. First option I've seen in all of my searching.

I'm torn. I still like the idea of an all-ticking stripe cover, but the one with the two sides would give some versatility as the boys get older. I just can't tell if the latter looks too "nice/grown-up" to go with the star quilt. So what do you think? And please don't just say, "I'm sure that whatever you pick will be nice." ;-) I need to hear your thoughts so that I can noodle on this some more and figure out what I'm going to do. Here are all the pieces together so that you can see them side-by-side.

Now, lay it on me.