Bedroom Bling

I love my "new" bedroom.  I've been working on redecorating it for two months, and I am absolutely in love with the way it turned out.  There was just one more thing it needed...

I love the gloomy blues and greens in the room, but the black bed frame was a bit heavy and bland.  There's a lot of black in the room - in some of the furniture, in the picture frames - but it's punctuated with little dots of light in gold handles, knobs, and even some of the frames.  I wanted the bed to reflect that, and I've always loved the look of a black metal bed with gold bedknobs and finials.

This scared me, I'll be honest.  This gold metallic spray paint is BRIGHT GOLD, and I was worried that it would be WAY too much.  But at this point, there was no going back.  Especially since getting the headboard and footboard masked off with tape and newspaper took me like three hours. Whew!

It was, however, all worth it.  This is just exactly the amount of shininess this bed needed, and I LOVE the way it looks!  I love the way the gold catches the light, and the way all the little points of light on the bed sort of echo the sparkle of the string lights on the standing screen in the corner.  It pulls in the frames and the drawer knobs - in fact, I feel like I might paint another couple of the picture frames, I just haven't decided which yet.

I finally feel like my bedroom is done.

You know, for now.

Blue and Green Shadows: Bedroom Makeover

Long post warning.


When last we saw my bedroom, it looked like this:

I had a white-on-white bedroom for about six years, the centerpiece of which was my beloved Ikea Alvine Kvist duvet cover and shams.  I loved the white look, but I was getting a little bored and wanted some color, so when I moved into my current home I painted my bedroom a sort of dusty medium blue (Sherwin Williams' Silvermist) without a second thought.  However, a few months in I realized that my blue walls and white floral comforter were looking a bit little-girl-bedroom-ish.

Then about a month ago I was looking through Ikea's online catalog, and I found this spread:

I needed it. I fell instantly in love with the tonal color scheme.  I needed those blue and green shadows playing off each other.  I needed the turquoises and teals and mints and aquas and deep, dark, hunter green.  I needed them in my life.

I instantly set about converting my bedroom to a room based on that picture.  Because I'm NUTS about blue and always have been, my house had no shortage of random knick knacks to harvest to use in my bedroom.  I removed everything that wasn't blue or green, and brought in a few blue and green things from around the house.  I changed most of the feel without spending a dime.

For the bedding - the biggest part of the makeover - I ordered this duvet cover and shams set from Amazon.com.  It's a perfect medium jade green (it matches Sherwin Williams' Privilege Green (what a weird name) and it plays with the blue sheets in a really neat way.

I also created a gallery wall above/around the bed, which was sort of accidental.  I love the nude woman on the green background (artist: Matt Manley) and planned to only frame a couple of small posters next to it to balance out its height;  but before I knew it I had created a whole wall of artwork in similar colors to those of the bedroom, and I LOVE the way it turned out.

I exchanged the white Ikea curtains for a set of muted teal sheers that I ordered online.  I hung 4 panels on the window instead of two, for depth and a little more light control.  There's still plenty of light for the plants, but the room isn't flooded in glare all the time - it's nice and moody, and dark at night.

I moved the wooden jali screen from behind my bed's headboard over to the corner, and hung solar string lights from the top of it (the little solar panel hides behind the curtains in the window). I have to say, I didn't think I'd like the lights, but I LOVE them so much.  In front of the screen and below the hanging philodendron is a small Ficus tree in a blue-gray scalloped ceramic planter.

On the other side of the window, next to my dresser, sits a blue Ikea Raskog utility cart.   The top of it is filled with small plants and cuttings, and glass jars.  Lower shelves house random things that I use regularly but which don't really match the room or have a permanent home - my makeup, jars of lotion, some books, and other little things like that.

This giant silver metal tray came from Ikea a million years ag (I forget the name) - and, actually, so did the dresser it's sitting on (I spray painted the handles gold).  Also dresser-top are a green jade lotus incense burner, a small gold picture frame, a Ming Aralia in a teal planter, a couple of blue glass bottles, and, centrally, a blue-green glass vase I scored at Goodwill for $3, with a fake white peony in.

The vanity in my room is all white, and there's nothing I can do about that, unfortunately.  But I have stashed lots of blue and green glass items on it - most of them are actually useful and contain little toiletry items like swabs, cotton balls, perfumes, and so on.

On the north wall of the room is my black jewelry cabinet and dressing table,  a small window with a dusky teal sheer curtain on it.  There's also a  Tullsta tub chair from Ikea, with their "Nordvalla" light green cover. 

So that's the room so far.  I love the way it looks, particularly at night when the string lights and the bedside lamp are the only light in the room and everything is all dusky and shadowy.  I don't know that I'm done with it - there could always be more blue and green glass in my life, hehe.  I think the room needs more little pops of gold and/or copper.  We'll see.  It'll be fun to play with until I get it right.

For fun, and to check my work, I matched up nearly everything in my room with my Sherwin Williams paint deck.  The deck is a few years old, so some of the colors are have been replaced/renamed, but they still come up on a google search if you want to see them. Here are the colors I've used in this room:


Blues:
Silvermist (walls)
Rain (sheets)
Quietude (glassware/ceramics)
Tempe Star (Raskog cart and some of the glassware)
Moody Blue (glassware)
Really Teal (curtains)

Greens:
Softened Green (lotus incense holder)
Hunt Club (chair pillow, pillowcases on the bed)
Courtyard (Manley painting background, most of the plants)
Rosemary (glassware)
Comfort Gray  (glassware/ceramics)
Spearmint (Ikea Tullsta chair cover)
Privilege Green (duvet cover and shams)

New House: First Project

Well, the move is finished and we're busy settling in.  After a few weeks of scurrying around unpacking and figuring out what to do with all of our stuff, everything is  mostly coming together.  We love the place so far: the floor plan is open and comfortable, there's plenty of storage, and there's a nice, big backyard for the dogs to play in.

The First Order of Business

So what's the first thing I did to the house?  I did what you've seen me do a thousand times on this blog: I painted something BLUE.

BEFORE

The walls of my bedroom were painted a dingy butter-yellow with a steel-blue accent wall. The paint job on the walls was old - filled with chips, smudges, dirty areas around light switches, and tons of nail holes. Plus, I despise yellow.  Thankfully, the landpeople said that since they weren't repainting the place before we moved in, that we could paint anything we wanted.  Woohoo!

How old-school-cool is it that there are sinks in the master bedroom?  I'm kind of loving it. 

AFTER

I love this color!!  It's Sherwin Williams' Silvermist, which is a soft, muted, dusky, greenish blue. Truth be told I was hoping to find something paler and grayer than this, but I opted for the right tone rather than the right depth, hoping it would work, and I LOVE the way it turned out.  My bedroom's been white for the last four years (by choice), and as much as I loved it, I'm really digging having color on my walls again.

CAT

I tell you what, as much as I love painting, it's no fun painting walls that go all the way up to the roofline.  I don't have a ladder that tall!  For the trim on the tallest wall, I stood at the very top of my 6' ladder with a 5' extension pole with a 2" foam brush taped to the end of it.  It took forever and it was SCARY.  Thankfully, I did not fall and die.

What's Next? 

1. Paint-wise, the bathroom and craft room are next - both are also painted in the yellow/blue color scheme that my bedroom was, the paint job equally old and battered.  The craft room will be painted with the left over Silvermist;  I'm not sure what color the bathroom will end up.    

2.  Sylvan and I have been hanging a lot of art, but we lack adequate wall space because of all of the large, tall furniture we have in the living room.  Solution?  Gallery wall! More on that very soon.  

3.  The landscaping at this place was seriously neglected for a very long time.  Technically, my first project in the house was a 6-hour landscaping bender in which I mowed the entire property (which is huge) and pruned back twelve bushes and a small tree which were all so overgrown that they were swallowing the back patio.  Next is the front "garden" under the windows, which is badly overgrown and full of weeds and anthills.  It's got a lovely little stone border, though, that's currently hidden under a battalion of dead Daylilies and "Monkey Grass" - once the dead plants are removed and the stones are washed off, it should be quite lovely.  

The Bedroom

I haven't done anything in here, project-wise;  I just finally got it all together and cleaned up for photographs - and I'm showing off, because I loooooove my bedroom.

Clockwise from the door:

My dresser, the Ikea SONGESAND, which took me nearly two months to find, because it was always out of stock.  Popular one, this thing!

This thing is a big block, but it seems less bulky in a tiny (9x10') room crammed with furniture than I thought it would be.  I love it, though - it's pretty, the finish feels nice, the color is gorgeously dark,  the drawers roll smoothly and quietly, and I have drawer organizers in some of the drawers to help corral my things, which works great.

My vanity, composed of:

•  an old hall console table that I painted
• A $10 Goodwill bathroom medicine cabinet, also painted, which houses things like jewelry, perfumes, beauty products, and hair things. 

The Tilden metal bed from Target, with Ikea bedding, a wooden jali screen from World Market, and an antique side table given to me years ago by a friend.  

As you can see in this pic, I have about a 3.5' walkway around the bed to move in, and that's all. It's a tiny room. But since I'm a person who doesn't really do anything but sleep and get dressed in here (I don't hang out in my room), that's really all I need. 

At the end of the bed is a wee nightstand table that I refinished years ago, the giant mirror from the fireplace at my old house, and my acoustic guitar, Ember (an Ibanez AEW40). The curtains on both windows are Ikea's MATILDA. 

This bedroom, the design of which I've been working on for three years now, makes me feel like a Jane Austen heroine.  I never thought I'd want white walls again, after I moved out of my last apartment in 2004; but I love the feel of this room, and I'm finally happy with it, and finally feel like it's complete. I didn't even have to paint this one myself. 

About that vanity cabinet...

Because I adore my cabinet, and I'm super proud of it, here's some more of it's awesomeness: 

It's made from a bathroom medicine cabinet I got at Goodwill for $10.  I cleaned it thoroughly (and cleaned gum off the inside. Gum! Who does that?), primed it and then painted it black.

The necklaces up top are hung on bronze-colored shower curtain rings on a tension rod that I keep meaning to spray paint to match.

There used to be a second shelf, but I got tired of having to pile my necklaces on it to get the doors to close, so I took it out.

The insides of the doors are painted in black chalkboard paint.  I draw little pictures and write inspirational quotes on them to perk myself up in the mornings.  How Pinterest of me, I know.  Currently, they say:

• "goooob morning", a tribute to Thoughts of Dog
• "I am enough", which is what it says on a ring that a friend gave me, because she said I needed it. ♥ 
• "Always use your full ass!"  Never half-ass anything. 
• "Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'" ~ Shawshank Redemption (this is what I tell myself when I'm having a hard time getting off my butt to do things) 

Oops.   Loch Ness Handster.

They All Rolled Over and One Fell Out

Seven years is a pretty good run for a bed.  Especially a wooden bed that you built yourself, when you'd never built more than a simple shelf before.  Sadly, my long-beloved bed finally gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, and I've been sleeping at an angle ever since, due to the way in which it sort of half-collapsed.
Oops.

I'd been looking for the perfect metal bed as a replacement, and I really wanted the SVELVIK from Ikea.  However, (as with 90% of the things I lust after at Ikea), I waited too long and the SVELVIK had been discontinued by the time I showed up ready to buy one.
Oops.

Target, and the internet to the rescue!   It isn't exactly the SVELVIK, but it'll do nicely - and does.  This went together easily and relatively quickly.  It's nice and solid, and I like the finish on it.  Best of all, it's inexpensive - and it was even 30% off last week when I ordered it.

I've been playing with the bay box window in the bedroom, too:  more plants, fewer laundry baskets on the windowsill.

Bonus:
Ikea's RASKOG cart being a bicycle  workshop cart (with GLIS organizer box in the top).  It's not terribly organized yet;  I just have small things on top, medium-large things in the middle, and BIG things in the bottom (mostly the tarp I put down when I clean the bikes indoors).

Sorry about the weird photo filter. My phone did that and I couldn't be arsed to take a new pic at 6:30am.  :D

More Blue Things

I'd been sort of half-assedly keeping an eye out for an affordable, blue rug for my room for years, but never found one that really caught my eye (that wasn't also ridiculously expensive). 

I finally found the right one last weekend at Target, when I wasn't even looking for rugs (isn't that the way it always happens?)  Hooray!  It's this one, if you're curious.

At 5x7', it doesn't cover much of the floor under the bed, but that's fine by me - it covers exactly the areas that I walk on, which is all I needed. 

A worn-looking pattern on a brand-new, fluffy, soft rug is a bit silly, I think, but I love it anyway.  And I adore the colors. 

I don't know how much Daisy understands about cameras and photography, but she sure gets RIGHT in front of me every time I whip it out.  Today, she would like you to know that she has an itch.  Dork dog.

Bedroom: Accomplished

My weekend was extremely busy.  I was off work on Friday; I basically woke up, had some coffee, and got to work - and didn't stop until Sunday night.  I painted walls and fixtures, moved furniture, repaired furniture, worked in the yard, cut pieces of wood into smaller pieces, worked on my bicycle, rearranged rooms, hung curtains, knocked out a bunch of boring, regular ol' housework - so many things!  I'm actually sore all over, I worked so hard. 

My biggest (and favorite) accomplishment from the weekend was this:

At last, a bedroom that looks like my actual bedroom!  Literally, actually - like 90% of the things in here came from my room at the old house;  even the paint color is similar (this is Glidden "White Bucks," a very, very pale gray;  the old room was Behr's "White Clay", which was a warm white with yellowy-green undertones). 

All of my old bedroom furniture is here.  I didn't exactly want to throw it all into the same corner, but, that's the way the room works.  Believe me, I'm perfectly willing to sacrifice options for that huge, glorious box window. 

It ends up functioning like a little "work triangle", like you hear about in kitchen design - it definitely makes getting ready for work in the morning fairly hassle-free.

Interior With Woman Reading,
Carl Holsoe, 1863-1935

In case you're wondering - and I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it before - my inspiration in this room (and its predecessor) comes largely from Carl Villhelm Holsøe's paintings of his home.  I like Victorian interior paintings in general; but there's a contented tranquility in Holsøe's work that I really love. 

 I cannot get enough of this amazing, 16"-deep box window. 

 Rabi likes it, too. 

In case you missed it in the pictures above, this is my Aardvarkadile.  It's a crocodile with enormous, floppy, lopsided ears, because...well, why the hell not, right?
Hee.

Just in case you forgot, here's what the room looked like before I moved in - not a terrible blue on the walls; teal and gold inside the window box and all over a decorative shelf that spanned one wall of the room; linoleum tile on the floors. 

There's also a hand-painted ceiling fan;  it's still there, but I flipped the blades so that the plain, pale-wood-look side shows. 

The pink duct tape on the window was actually holding one of the panes in place - about a week ago I removed the tape, the pane, and all the old caulking, and re-set the pane into the frame. 

Things left to do in this room:  

• baseboards will be installed soon by the tilers, who removed the old ones when they installed the new (gray, ceramic, wood-look) tile throughout the house
• there's no door on the closet.  If I catch that curtain on my face and pull it down onto my own head one. more. time...
• what was left of my bedframe finally collapsed!  Time for a new bed. 
• The windows desperately need blinds, or some other privacy-protecting covering, underneath the sheer, white curtains.  That window film, though lovely - even though it's mismatched - is practically transparent at night when the lights are on indoors. No bueno. 

Bedrooms Underway

I've begun painting - well, okay, priming - my bedroom.  I'm nowhere near ready to show you a whole room yet, but here's a shot of the inside of the box window in progress:

The room itself is a medium/pale blue; inside the box window is a deep teal with a metallic gold paint sponged over it. 

I'm painting the room white for now, because that's what it was before, and I loved it; and also because white paint is what I have (left over from last month when I spent two weeks painting the old house out in a "neutral" color that turned out to be a bit lighter than I thought it would be (Glidden "White Bucks", which is actually a very pale, warm gray. Very pale).  I may change the color later, but for now, I'd really like to be ONE color.

Other plans include purchasing blinds to go into these windows; hanging curtains (blue or white sheers from the old house, not sure yet); and decorating that big, glorious window seat with cushions and plants. I'd also like to replace that window film so that the film is the same on all the panes - something low-e that offers a bit more privacy. (These swirly and frosted-looking bits are lovely, but I can see every detail in that room from the outside, and my eyesight is terrible).

(For reference, the "White bucks" on every square inch of the old house, just after we moved out).


















Meanwhile, over the weekend I painted Sylvan's bedroom.  I still have to finish the trim and doors in there, and then paint the ceiling; I'll have pics of that when it's all finished, too.

More soon!

"Ok...Who Had 'Two Months'? Two Months? Anyone?"

That would be the sound of my BFF pretending to have taken bets on how long it takes me to completely re-do something once I've finished re-doing it, LOL.  She's kinda right.

In this case, it's the new bedroom from back in November:

Don't get me wrong, I love it.  I was really skeptical about moving from such a huge, open bedroom, into this weeny tiny one, but I LOVE how cozy and secure it feels to sleep in this space.  I haven't been in the habit of just hanging out in my bedroom since I was a teenager, so this room is actually pretty perfect, space-wise, since I only use it for sleeping and dressing.

Between the closet, dresser, and armoire, I have all the storage I need.  I love the colors, the curtains, and the way the room works both visually and functionally.

So what needed changing?

The Bed

You guys remember the big, wooden, canopy bed that I built back in 2009, right?

L-R:  building in 2009, bedroom 2009, 2011, and 2013

As much as I've always loved this bed, it had gotten to be too big - and it was definitely too big for my new, smaller bedroom.  And although I like having a low bed these days, in the new bedroom it wasn't on any sort of frame or platform at all - the box spring was directly on the floor, and it was too low, and too close to where all the dog hair lives.  Blech.

I also really love the metal Ikea headboard;  but I did NOT love the way it mounted directly onto the wall.  It never stayed on the wall, and every time I so much as moved a pillow, the thing would rattle and clang.  And because it mounted to the wall, it limited where I could put the bed in the new bedroom as well.

And so I cut down the posts of the wooden bed.  I made the feet shorter (the bottom of the bed frame is only 4" from the floor), and I turned the 7' canopy posts into shorter, "normal" sized bed posts (60" at the head, and 23" at the foot).  I touched up the stain job on all of the pieces, and reset the mounting brackets as well.  I removed the head-rail piece from the bed, and mounted the Ikea headboard directly onto the posts at the head of the bed using copper tube straps (spray-painted black), so that it was all one piece, and free of the wall - which let me re-position the bed to allow for more floor space in the room.

BEFORE

AFTER - SO MUCH MORE FLOOR! 

Now to get some stuff up on that big, empty wall above the bed.  ☺


. 

A New, Two-Day Bedroom

When last we met my sewing/craft room, it looked like this:

And that was pretty cool.  But...  

Yesterday I began a "Trading Spaces" -style two-day whirlwind makeover.



I painted the ceiling, a wide band around the lower baseboards, window, and doorways, patched holes and primed over them, and then went to work in the garage mixing paint.

Sherwin Williams' "Distance"

While I had had every intention of actually purchasing paint for this project, my recent layoff meant that I couldn't - and it turns out I didn't need to:  I had a blue that was close enough to the color I wanted that it took very little adjustment to make it work.










AND THEN...

.

Lesson 1:  this color is a bitch to photograph.  sigh.  

These curtains, and the pendant lamp over the nigtstand, are the only things that stayed - both
were part of the ex-sewing room.

Had to lay down on my bed to take this shot.  Almost didn't get up. 

I'll note here that (a) this pic (above) is the truest representation of this color in photos so far.  It's really hard to photograph!  And also (b) you can see here why I painted a thick band of white around all of the molding.  Such a tiny room in such a dark color needs all the highlighting it can get, in order to bounce around a bit of extra light, shrink the dark expanses a bit, and give structure to a plain, boxy room.  I like how the overall effect is kinda bungalow-y.  :)

A silver-plated serving tray given to me by a friend last year, for my jewelry.  Yay! 

The only thing left to do in the room is to hang my jewelry cabinet, but at the moment it's kind of buried in the old bedroom under a mountain of craft crap (crapft).  Guess what I'm doing tomorrow?  :D