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)

Making Over the Craft Room

It was time to do a complete overhaul of the entire craft room.  Here's what it looked like before:

Cluttered, crammed full of small furniture, and with a terrible, dark paint job.  We basically moved in, shoved a bunch of crap into this room, and never touched it again.  Bad. 

This little bookshelf wasn't being put to use very well - it was crammed up against the doorway and stuffed full of random crap that belonged in the closet.  

The closet doors were missing, and nothing in the closet (or out of it, truthfully) was very well organized.

First I set about organizing the room.  There were a couple of boxes which should have been stored in the garage that I moved out there;  everything else in the closet got reorganized and re-stacked, so that it would STAY in the closet.  Surfaces were cleared, things were put into plastic bins and stored on an Ikea Hyllis shelving unit in the closet.

Next:

1. I painted the room, in a color I mixed myself by adding some yellow-gold to the SW Silvermist I had on hand leftover from my bedroom. The resulting shade matches up to SW Comfort Gray, if you're interested.  
2. I hung curtains - I moved the white Ikea Matilda semi-sheers from my bedroom into this room, once replacements for the bedroom arrived in the mail (more on that later).  
3. I found the closet doors in the garage, ordered some replacement hardware for them, and re-hung them in the room.  The doors also got a fresh coat of white paint.  
4. I hung the ironing board on the wall behind the entry door, to keep it out of the way
5. I hung a pendant lamp over the sewing table, using an Ikea Hemma light kit and a glass sconce I've had for years.  It and the sewing machines are plugged into a power strip mounted on the side of the desk so that I can turn the entire sewing table on with one button.  
6. I moved a short bookcase from the door of the room over to the corner behind the sewing desk, and moved a small dresser to the door of the room, to hold the printer and printer supplies
7. I hung new art (printed from online) over the bookcase and art table in the rear of the room

Here's the whole room, more or less, in its finished state.  It's lighter and brighter, the windows softer, the furniture balanced and the floorplan open.  I rearranged the furniture and moved that little bookshelf next to the window to balance out the art table on the right side.  I LOVE my new sewing desk, and having doors back on the closet makes a huge difference in how clean and organized the room feels. 

The desk is made from a pair of Ikea Helmer file cabinets, spray painted in "Coastal Sage" (Rustoleum American Accents), with a 2x4' birch project panel across the top - up on 1" shelf risers to make the desk height the correct height.  I've got both sewing machines, the overhead light, and the pencil sharpener and iron plugged into the power strip on the right side of the desk, so I can turn EVERYTHING on at once with the touch of a button.  

Finally, the closet doors.  There's nothing remarkable about them, except that they're finally hung (it took some doing, and I had to buy all new mounting hardware), and they CLOSE and hide all the "organized clutter" inside.  

Tada!   

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!

A Whole New Dining Room, Sort Of

Welcome back, me.

So, someone, at some time, painted a steel blue accent wall in almost every room of this house.  You saw the one in the bedroom a few months ago.  Here's the one in the dining room:

We'll, um, we'll talk about the burlap-and-ruffles light fixture in a minute.

For now, I wanted to show you this, which took all of an hour to accomplish:

It's nothing special, I just painted the wall white like the rest of the walls in the dining room, kitchen, and living room.  It's boring, but it blends in with the rest of the house, which is what I wanted it to do.

Okay, let's talk about this.  This is a cut-corner rectangle lampshade onto which has been hot-glued burlap and strips of an OFELIA blanket from Ikea (I have the same blanket and recognized it immediately).  It's another hideous artefact of the previous tenant, who left behind other treasures such as ugly, heavy drapes, broken curtain rods, gallons of used paint, and countertop scraps.

I mean...

For some reason - maybe this is an old light fixture thing that I just didn't know about? - I had to un-wire the bulb housing from this light fixture in order to get the shade off the fixture.  So this took a minute longer than I thought it would.  But it was easy - and here's the new shade:

There.  Plain, white, unassuming, boring, blends with everything.  It's also quite a bit brighter, since the bulb isn't having to fight against that burlap to get light out.

So that's the dining room squared away, until we can get a table in there to work at and maybe also eat at.  At the moment I'm working on things in the living room, and I'll have some new bedroom stuff to show you in the next couple of weeks, too.  TTFN.

A Small Project With a Huge Impact

an Ikea Hack in the making

About a billion years ago (2015?) I purchased a SVARTÅSEN laptop table from Ikea.  It was awesome!  A little personal workspace - for my laptop, or my art, my nails, whatever I needed.

Problem is, moving into the house was so hectic, that this little thing got left outside, forgotten for several weeks, in the rain.  No big deal, though, right?  The top is plastic.

Except it turns out it wasn't plastic - it was laminated fiberboard, as I discovered upon turning this thing over to find a big, rotten mess.  Oops.

Not to worry:  I had a couple of small, wide boards left over from the built-in bookshelf project, and one of them just happened to be exactly as wide and deep as the Ikea Svartasen top.  I didn't even bother with copying the shape, I just used the entire board, in the hopes that the extra weight wouldn't unbalance the table (it doesn't) and that the new corners would give me more room to work (they do). 

(pay no attention to the hideous denim couch)

Here's the "new table", after I sanded, stained, and sealed the board, and screwed it onto the existing base.

I swapped the coffee table for a smaller one, too, and between these two tables taking up far less space than before, there's plenty of room for my elderly doggo, Shelly, to walk around, and lay down next to me on the floor.

The big rectangle is SO much better to work on than the little roundy-triangle shape the table came with!  It feels humongous, and it's nice to be able to spread out while I'm working. 

The little clip-on LED task light from Ikea  that's clamped to the table is REALLY BRIGHT, so I made a little lampshade out of a scrap of printer paper, to keep the light on my work and not in my eyes. It looks silly, but it works!

Cyclamen, 1-28-18

Just in case anyone's curious, this is the drawing on the table in the sketchbook on the table.  The little wonky leaf cracks me up - I was trying to remember how the patterns go without looking at the actual plant, and failed miserably.  I love mistakes like this, though; I love seeing them in old sketchbooks, and seeing how far I've come from those old drawings.

I have a weird urge to paint something cool on the surface of my "new" table.  I'll let you know if I do.

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.  ☺


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Another "New" Bathroom Light Fixture

Because seriously, ew:

That's the light fixture that's been in my master bath since 2004.  Came with the house. I *hate* these, and somehow in ten years I've never replaced it. 

In March, I replaced the guest bath fixture with an Italian tole chandlier that I fixed up.  Over this past weekend, I finally got around to putting the one that came out of the guest bath into the master: 

It's a bit dwarfed* by the gigantic sheet mirror that has also been there since the house was built;  but I intend to replace that thing, too, eventually.  For now, I really love the 3-light fixture in here.  I've been using my six-lamp fixture with only three bulbs in it, so there's no change in the amount of light, though this new fixture does change the angle a bit.  I'm perfectly happy with it, though.  It's warm and soft.  Not great for putting on makeup, but I do that at my vanity cabinet, since I can stand directly in front of it instead of having to lean over a counter because of my crappy eyesight, hehe. 

And of course, because the simplicity of the "plug and play" aspect of changing light fixtures is often just too good to be true, it took me two hours to get this thing in place, because the old six-lamp fixture was screwed directly into the wall - not mounted on a bracket.  Luckily, I had a bracket, threaded rod, and a large assortment of nuts and washers and screws to choose from, in order to get this thing mounted correctly and securely.  

* "Dwarf" is one of those words I can never type correctly on the first try.  I touch-type (without looking at the keyboard) at nearly 100wpm, and yet every time, it comes out "drawf."  Sigh. 

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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

Tole!

Remember the antique lily chandelier that I acquired and refinished, and hung in my guest bath?

(via ME!) 

I've recently come across TWO blog posts about them -  Apartment Therapy has one up today; and Design Sponge has one from 2013.

This chandelier is Italian "Tole" (/toe-lə/), and refers to ornate fixtures usually painted, gilded, or shellac'd (to prevent rust on metal fixtures) - and also refers to similarly-painted tin trays and other metal or wood objects. They're often brightly colored:

(Pinterest, Ebay)

(Pinterest, Etsy) 

Or painted in gold, or darker metal tones:

(from http://www.frankie.com.au/, via Apartment Therapy)

Squee!  I have to admit, I don't like the colored ones; but I LOVE the white and gold finishes I've seen.  and I adore my gold bathroom chandelier. :)

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