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)

Unf*cking the Living Room: Step One

This is the first of what will be several posts about fixing up the living room.  I have a LOT of work to do, and I'm starting from the ground up.  I'm excited about it, and I can't wait to see some of the new changes myself. 

The problems we're dealing with in the living room are:

1. Tall, dark furniture looming over the seating arrangement
2. Not a whole lot of natural light
3. Dark furniture in the seating area
4. Not enough seating

Today I want to talk about the first thing, and address the floor plan.  Here is is "before": 

See the line of black bookhelves across the north wall (bottom of plan)?  There's a cabinet adjacent the to west, and across to the south a large, dark tv on a large, dark stand.  Altogether, they make sitting in the room feel like being at the bottom of a big, dark bucket.  Here's the room itself: 

sorry about the text, i was experimenting

From the other side, the room looks like this:

The chair on the left there is crammed up against a bookshelf, and the chair and side table and sofa are so close together you can't walk between them. 

Here's what we did to the bookshelves: 

(experimenting with furniture colors, please ignore)

All the bookshelves slid over and around the corner so that most of them are now on the west wall.  This leaves a lot of open space in the room for the chair and sofa. 

In the room, it looks like this:

Now the bookshelves are a part of the room, instead of towering over it - they feel like a discrete piece of furniture instead of a wall of furniture.  One chair is still at the bottom of a bookshelf, but in this case, it feels like it's part of a library - or so says my roommate, and she likes it. 

The other side of the room is completely open.  Now the chair and sofa are a comfortable distance apart.  The rug isn't large enough for the seating area, but that may be one of the changes coming up. 

New things happening in the room in the next few weeks: 

• A new slipcover for the sofa
• Maaaybe new slipcovers for the chairs
• New curtains on the back door
• New lighting? 
• A couple of new pieces of furniture

I also have some updates for the bedroom in a few weeks.  Stay tuned!

The Color Post

I finally got around to matching up ALL of my house colors and creating a little collection of sample cards for future matching and/or re-painting purposes!  I'm not sure how I'll organize it all just yet (I'd make a scrapbook type thing, but I know I'd never keep up with it), but for the time being, here are the colors in my home:

Ceilings, throughout the house:  Behr's White Clay




Walls, common areas (kitchen, dining, halls, living/music room):  Glidden's Wood Smoke

Doors in the house:  Behr's Carbon

Sewing Room:  Glidden's Pale Red Dust

Master Bedroom:  Martha Stewart Living's Rainwater

Master Bathroom:   Behr's Urban Raincoat

Exterior trim (behind):  Behr's Farmhouse

Exterior siding (front): Behr's Old Map












Some Notes:

• I did not choose the exterior colors, and I hate them.  I matched the exterior colors because I may need to paint a new garage door  (when I get it replaced) to the house.  Playing with paint samples I think if I had a clearer "white" on the trim, instead of Farmhouse, which is a really gross green-white, I might be happier with the siding.  Really, though, the whole house needs to be repainted.  It's 10y old. 
• Yes, the blues in the master suite are supposed to match.  I have some things planned for the master bathroom and linen closet for the upcoming months; when I start work in that end of the house I'll be repainting the entire suite in a single color.  
• The only spaces missing from this post are the guest bath and adjacent hallway, which are painted from floor to ceiling in White Clay;  and the "art studio" (giant closet), which is just primer-white for now. 

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Guest Bathroom: A History

Once upon a time, there was this white-with-blue-accents thing that was too sparse, boring, and filled with shells, for some reason:

2008

And then there was this boho weirdness, which I loved at the time, and was a LOT of work (sponge-ing the walls and stenciling the border), and now I'm like...the fu...?

2010

(Although I really did love the stenciled border and two-tone effect)

Then there was white:

2011

Which I LOVED...but it needed...something...

2011

...eh? Yeah, not so much on the gray.  The whole house is gray.  And while I love it in the common areas, it was just plain boring in here (and in the craft room, but we'll get to that in a few weeks).  I found myself longing for that white again - the white on the top half of the room was just primer, so I primed over the bottom, and then painted the entire room in that same White Clay (Behr) that I did some of the ceilings in the house in a few months ago:

no, I haven't hung the mirror yet.  I can't get it up there
by myself! 

I also took the opportunity to prime and re-paint all the trim molding in the room, the cabinetry, and both sides of the door, since all the glossy oil paint on the trim and doors in the house is getting yellowed with age.   I love the blue-on-blue effect in my master bathroom, where all the molding is painted the same color as the walls,  and I'm loving that effect in this room, too.

I also put a leftover piece of door molding that I'd had sitting in the garage for eons up on the wall here - eventually, it'll have more than one hook on it, but at the moment, the one I had works fine, hehe.

The White Clay is quite a warm off-white;  on its own it's more of a meringue color, or maybe like a latte foam color.  Vanilla creme cake frosting?  (I'm hungry).  I like it!

There's more to come in this bathroom, but first..the hallway outside of it...


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Bedroom Art Wall!

In the meantime (while I await that elusive moment when I'm home during daylight hours (stupid Daylight Savings Time) and happen to catch that ONE MINUTE during the day when the living room is actually fully lit by the windows so that I can get a decent picture of the couch cover that is *finished*),  I have fixed the art wall and the Ung Drill frame in the bedroom!

before - meh.

After:  yay!

The "painting" (a printout made with Blockposter.com) is a section of Bougereau's Evening Mood, which is one of my favorite paintings in the entire world.   Also shown: a couple of pairs of Divine Lovers (Radha/Krishna and Shiva/Parvati) and a print of a Thai tapestry depicting similar themes, one of my favorite Orientalist Odalisques (which one, though...Fortuny? I think?), and a purple sitar painting from...somewhere?  Love, God, beauty, and music.  :)

taller nightstand; still-unplayed guitar

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Hallo-week 2: Come On In!

Front entry:  bats, webs, and SKELETON FLAMINGOS.  I heart my skeleton flingos. Hee!  <3

The bats are just cut from light construction paper and stapled to the wall and post.  The planters, by the way, are filled with a mix of Sanseviera, Dracaena marginata, and red Caladiums...not that you can see them all that well in this picture.  The decorative piece above the doorway? Is a $10 plastic doormat.

Purple/red glow on the front porch after dark.  Yay!

And a blue tint on the back porch - the lights are purple like the ones on the front porch.  I've already replaced the blue bulb in the overhead light with a white one again - for security reasons - but I'm actually contemplating leaving the purple lights.  They're so cute! And it's much nicer to have them on at night when I'm relaxing outside than a bright glare from above.  We'll see.

Here's the little "lantern" I made with the Ikea JÄTTEBRA plant cachepot - all it needed was a candle.  I love the way it looks kinda starry.  :) 

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More Sewing Room "Afters": Storage Boxes

Remember the, uh, "storage" situation in my sewing room?

I know.  UGH.  Ugly, beat-up, naked cardboard boxes.  Too-big-for-the-shelf cardboard boxes.  Stuffed-full-of-crap-I-don't-use cardboard boxes.  

Today I browser-window shopped while I was at work*...and then I scavenged the Box Graveyard that the people in shipping keep making in my nice, organized file room (grrr) and...brought home several more cardboard boxes.  New, crisp cardboard boxes.  Smaller cardboard boxes.

After work, I busted out some black stripe and black-white flocked damask-print gift-wrap that I'd been saving for a rainy ugly-cardboard kind of day, and...

Cheater!  Fronts only, to conserve both wrapping paper and tape, which I discovered tonight is in pretty short supply around my house - also because the sides of the boxes won't show when they're put away. (They won't, right?).

Et voila!

Much better!

Not that I'm "done" or anything.  Off camera to the right is a mountain of BS I still have to sort through, most of which will be recycled or thrown away.

Also...

 Whatever.  ;)





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Sewing Room - the Beginning of the After

A few "after"-ish pics.  ("afters" for the whole room will have to wait until I'm actually done with the whole room, which may be years from now, fair warning):

After cleaning out the room (two years ago!) and ripping up the ugly, dog-stained carpet (ewww), I painted the cement floor green and the walls grey (not the same grey in the living room, but these were the walls that inspired the grey in the rest of the house).  

The ironing board that started it all!   Okay, actually it was this photo (Pure Style Home) that "started it all" in my sewing room.

that Singer is so old it's *yellow*

 

The "chalkboard" corkboard over my work table, with my little color-scheme suggestions stacked against it for inspiration to keep going and not just go play video games.  I painted this corkboard with black chalkboard paint, since I need a corkboard to pin up patterns, measurements, and design sketches for costumes and things, but I wanted the look of a chalkboard.  Now I have both!  (And no, you can't write on it - the cork texture makes erasing chalk and cleaning the board pretty close to impossible). 

A cheap plastic clock I bought for my office a couple of years ago, with a new coordinating background (a computer printout of a needlepoint fabric from JoAnn's). 

A poor-quality photo of the new shade over the window in the same green damask-print cotton that I used to cover the ironing board.  It's basically stationary - it can be raised and lowered, but I made it for looks, not functionality.  I use the mini blinds behind the shade for privacy when I need it.

The last couple of days I've been moving furniture around and painting a couple of bookshelves black so that they'll all coordinate (instead of it looking like a flea market in this room) - no pics yet, but I plan to move them in over the weekend and continue working.

More to come!


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Plants + Sewing Room

So...ever wondered where the inspiration for all those awesome wallpapers comes from?  Here's one:

 various "Acanthus" prints in wallpaper, tile, sculpture, stencils, fabrics

actual Acanthus plant (Acanthus mollis, a.k.a. "Bears' Breeches") 

And, just as a teaser...

Mood board for my sewing/craft room, as I slowly accumulate things I need to pull it off - which includes several variations on a black-white-green acanthus-y  "damask" theme. 

More on that when I actually get working in that room - gotta get the laundry room painted, then the craft room is next!

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