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)

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.

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. 

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...

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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

Soft Lighting, Small Lighting, Little Balls of Flame

Threw a couple of things together for my art studio last week that I'd been thinking about:

• A sheer, cotton, red, paisley curtain panel I've had in my fabric stash forever
• A wee (3") wooden shelf, cut from scrap, fixed in place about 2/3 up the window, with
• A bamboo rod and white muslin café curtain on clip-rings below it, and 
• A couple of glass bottles of Pothos and Philodenron rooting in them
• A trio of brightly-colored, glass, "Moroccan" candle lanterns hung where the sunlight can catch them.  They were a Christmas gift from a friend. :) 

After agonizing over what color to paint the room, I've decided NOT to paint it.  I like the white.  I like the backdrop it gives for ANY color I want.  I've decided that this is going to be my random, riotous, Boho paradise-y art space.  It IS a room for creativity, after all.  

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Meanwhile, In Living Room Land

This week, I have lots to do in the living room.  I'm finally making that day sofa cover, and I'll get to talking about this "new" couch I've alluded to in the past few weeks.  I'm also juuuuust about ready to start re-arranging the entire thing.  You heard me. The entire. Thing.  You'll see.

In the meantime, some inspiration pictures, which also serve as hints:

via Pinterest

Decorology

Pinterest

Apartment Therapy

Aziz, Light!

I don't know exactly when I went from "I love the dim, moody aspect of the light in here" to "OMG THIS PLACE IS A TOMB".  The whole ceiling and curtains thing in the bedroom recently was, when you get right down to it, mostly about the bedroom being entirely too dark to live with anymore.

The dining room has been feeling the same way.  Fortunately, that's an easy, fast, and FREE fix:

Much better than the way it was before.  These café length curtains were made from the old full-length sheers in about fifteen minutes.  The tablecloth is just a piece of linen from my fabric stash - not even hemmed (I like the soft ragged edges).

The mini-blinds are still up, because I DO still need a bit more privacy at night;  but then, this is just Phase I. When I get to the next layer of things in this dining room, I'll be dealing with the blinds then.

before:  pretty, but really dark when the light's off  (blinds, long curtains)

More in store for this room: 

• "phase 2" of the whole window treatment thing
• slight wall color adjustment
• ceiling paint, just like I did in the bedroom, for the dining room and kitchen
• chair facelift
• chandelier awesomation 

Stay tuned.

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Bigger & Brighter Bedroom

Maybe Blogger will get its head out of its @$$ and allow me to make this entry on the third try.  Hmph.

BEDROOM YAY!   I spent my Sunday afternoon correcting some issues in the master bedroom.  It was dark, mismatched, the curtains were fugly (seriously, wth was I thinking??), and there was still an old, queen-sized comforter on my king-sized bed.  Also, I was tired of looking at the blue ceiling:  it looked alright with the blue walls, but it was a different tone, too dark for the room, and, er, I had never bothered to go back and touch up around the edges when I painted it.  Whoops.

σ_σ

Fortunately, last week a sale and a coupon happened to me at the exact moment I was thinking about the bedroom issues, and I ordered a new, white duvet cover and shams in the correct size.

Over the weekend I sorted through all the paint in my garage (I have a lot of paint, you guys), and mixed together all my various whites and off-whites, to produce a soft, creamy off-white to use on the ceiling.  I also picked up a white, king-sized flat sheet, and made it into a pair of curtains;  I teamed those up with a pair of those Ikea LILL sheers that I have a frillion of and hung them hiiiigh on the walls under the the new, wide, ceiling border.

Et voila: 

Muuuch better!  The room is brighter, and feels about twice as big as it was before.

I absolutely adore the big, wide border around the top of the room.

And the off-white looks fantabulous with the wall color.

It's hard to see the curtains against the morning light in the pictures;  the white sheet-curtains are on one half, and the sheers on the other half.

While I like the effect, I do plan to get another sheet and repeat the process so that I have two curtains on each window, with the sheers in the center instead, so that it's a bit more balanced.


I also moved that dumb little rattan chair over to the window.  It feels less crammed-into-the-room in this corner;  the dog crate that was here is now more out of the way, and won't be getting doggy dust and grime all over the new white curtains.








Other things to continue working on:

• That dumb little rattan chair.  It's falling apart, and, well, it's pretty ugly.  I really would rather have something comfy and stuffed, like this.  
• Note the obvious lack of an actual comforter in the new comforter cover.  Oops.  Also - the ivory sheets are getting pretty worn, and need to be replaced.  With white, or blue, or gray.  Not sure yet. 
• The nightstands, which are functional, but boring as hell (as opposed to the old ones which were cute, but not remotely functional).  
• The bed needs a skirt to cover those box springs; and I do eventually plan to adjust the old four-poster frame to fit this bed. 

Anyway - yay!  I love it.  :) 

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Things To Paint: Furniture, Dining Room

My dining room:

This was in 2010 - the walls are now gray to match the rest of the house.  Which I love, but I have more plans...

sketch 2011

I still want to build the window seat in the bay, and string sheer curtains across it.


I'd also like to paint the dining room chairs black to match the table.

sketch May 9, 2012

I've also decided I want to brighten up the room a bit:

1.  Paint the [blue] ceilings in the kitchen and dining room a soft off-white, with an 8" border around the top of the walls to make a sort of "tray ceiling" look.

2.   Paint the walls, also, leaving the gray around the borders/"chair rail".

3.   I'm also going to put white linen café curtains into the bay windows, behind the sheer that will drape over the whole area;  and paint the insides of the window casings a deep charcoal, or maybe even black.


While I don't have the lumber yet to build the window seat, I DO have all the paint, fabric, curtains, and the Ikea DIGNITET curtain wire system to hang the giant sheers...I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.  

This weekend?  

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