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!   

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.

The Craft Room, and Another Big Change

I started this post two months ago, when I began working on the craft room.  I got a little distracted along the way, but we'll deal with why in a minute.   As you can see below, this room is red as fuck.  It's a gorgeous color, but very dark, and there's a whole lot of it in this big master bedroom-turned-craft room.

I started by finishing out all the baseboards, as in the rest of the house, and by cleaning, priming, and re-painting all the doors and trim.  The walls themselves are taking 2 coats of primer to cover up the red enough that it can be painted over. 

One wall of the room is textured with sand mixed into the red paint, just like the walls in the master bathroom walls ; except that on this wall, a sort of strié technique has been used to shape the sand texture into vertical  ridges. Just like in the bathroom, I wondered why??

While priming around one of the windows on this wall, I figured it out:  this wall is covered in wallpaper!  At some point, it was painted over (and over, and over - there are at least three different colors on top of it), and textured with the sand and dragging technique.

Hunter Green and burgundy, with gold.  Oh yeah! I thought. This house was built in 1984! Of course it's got plaid wallpaper. LOL.

I found wallpaper under the vanity in the master bath, too (blue with gold fleurs-de-lis)  - I bet it's all over the bathroom, under that sand texture. I can't believe I didn't put two and two together before.












So, I continue to chug along on this room.  It's about half primed now, and all of the trim and doors are finished;  It just needs a wall primed, and then paint on the whole thing. And while I've been working on repainting, I've also been  PACKING.

The Frost Is Off the Ground 

We're moving again.  My landlady-friend is selling the house.  Sylvan and I were supposed to spend 2017 preparing for a move to Oregon, but we both had a horrible year full of injuries and medical issues, and didn't get our shit together.  So we're looking for another rental house here in Austin. that isn't scary and that will accept 2 dogs and 5 cats.  And, of course, we're packing, and getting rid of as much as we can to facilitate a move into a smaller space, and eventually, a long move across the country.


I'm not going to lie, I'm kind of terrified.   But I'm pretty big on the idea of focusing on the tasks and items you can control, instead of worrying about the ones you can't.  We'll find a place; and in the meantime, I'm looking forward to not being anyone's live-in-handywoman anymore.  Projects are fun, right up until they're jobs.  Also, if I never have to repair any plumbing again, it'll be too soon.

So I'll keep you all updated on the usual house projects, the house search, and eventually, the new place!

BONUS CAT:  not supposed to be napping in houseplants

.

Because Poe Wrote on Both*

Another "Finally!" project is complete.  As much as I'd had an enormous Whirlwind of Projects! planned for my holiday break, I ended up sick the entire time and got nothing done (unless you count sitting around binge-watching episodes of The West Wing, at which I excelled).  Before I broke my foot in May 2017. I did two things:  I bought a new bike, and I started refinishing two desks. This is one of them, finally finished, ten months later.

This thing started life as a an unfinished, loosely Mission-style, sofa table. My roommate bought it roughly a thousand years ago, stained it herself, and used it for book and cat storage for many years, before deciding she wanted to use it as a writing table. A blue writing table.

The first task, then, was to make sure the thing was tall enough for her to sit at with an office chair.  It wasn't, but only by an inch:  four slices of a 2x2" stick, my jigsaw and hand planer, some sandpaper, and putty took care of that:

Next was to remove the drawer hardware, mostly-sand the whole thing down, and hit it with some Liquid Sander, which is still one of my favorite substances on the planet:

ready to prime! 

Liquid Sander is a deglosser - essentially a very mild stripper, that breaks down the outermost layer of finish on a piece - clearcoat, stain, paint, whatever.  It's meant to take the place of sanding;  I usually sand a piece first, to break up the clearcoat on the piece, before using the deglosser, so that it breaks down more of the outer layer of clearcoat/stain, and is better able to take primer and paint.

Just don't use it without gloves, unless you like your skin peeling off for the next two days.  Especially don't use it without gloves when you're using red shop rags to wipe it on, or you'll turn your fingers red:

sadtrombone.mp3

Since I suck at remembering to take "before" pictures, I used MS Paint to put the Mission side rails and drawer knobs back on for you, LOL:

This project leveled up in the fun department when I realized
that I could just KICK those side rails out.  BLAM! Hee.

First coat of primer: 

I put another coat of primer over the first, then painted it.  The paint was mixed from a remnant of SW's "Tradewinds" (which is what's on the walls), a little bit of a midnight blue to mute the color without graying it out, and a touch of orange to warm it up just enough to bring it into a "dusky" blue without turning it green. It took a bit of work to get it just right; but I love this shade of pale turquoise - a bit darker, and a lot greener/warmer than the wall color. 

(this looks crammed into a corner because of the angle of the
photo; but there's actually a good six feet of space back there) 

Roomie hasn't found the perfect drawer knobs just yet, so I threw some cheap little brass-finish Ikea knobs on it for the time being:  

(I told you everything I own is blue)

Now my roomie has a dedicated space in the house to work on her novels, when she doesn't feel like going out to a coffee shop to write.  

Next! 

cat tax

*The answer to "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" in case you've ever wondered. 

Master Bathroom

Another room in the "Finally!!" category!  While on the surface this was just a re-paint job, this project involved the following challenges:

• sanding uneven wall texture to even it out
• finishing a ceiling that was stuck up by remodelers years ago but never completed
• adjusting two light fixtures that were hanging all sideways
• scraping, patching, caulking, sealing, priming, and painting baseboards and door trim
• cleaning doors and walls before priming and painting
• sanding and smoothing out cabinet doors which had built-up stenciled paint all over them
• patching walls where decals were removed, which ripped huge holes in the paint underneath
• glitter.  so much glitter.  glitter everywhere. 

First of all, this room is shaped really weirdly, and it's really hard to photograph!  

This is a fairly decent representation of the new wall color, though, and shows part of what my roomie and I call The Poop Cave.  

Still Life w/ Ladder & Wonky Art, 2017

The Poop Cave even has a window, so your neighbors can watch you poop!  Okay, not really - the glass is frosted, and there's a giant tree right outside.  

I've debated putting up a wee curtain here, but I think I'll cover the whole thing in hanging plants.  

Art + towel rack =   o_O

Look, Nan: flip-flops!

I'm not sure what to call the wall color.  I mixed it using Sherwin Williams' "Tradewinds" and Behr's "Fresh Thyme Green."  The result came out almost identical to SW's "Comfort Gray" (which is green!), except it's more on the minty side. 

It's actually precisely the same color as Baskin Robbins' Daiquiri Ice sherbet/sorbet, which pleases me to an unusual degree. 

Now for the BEFORE pictures! 

As always, I forgot to take before pictures, so these are mid-project.  

This is...purple as fuck.  The previous painter mixed sand into the purple paint to create a sandy texture, and then went over the walls with gold glitter. The sand was a neat effect - I'd seen the idea on tv, and always wondered how it felt in real life. 

You can also see the 1984 shell-sink molded vanity in a lovely shade of "was this beige once??"  It's super yellowy, and as far as I can tell, it's supposed to be (no amount of cleaning/bleaching/ scrubbing/scraping has changed it).  

I sanded every inch of these walls before cleaning and priming, to knock back some of the over-textured areas (I literally cut my elbow on the wall once, I'm not kidding) and balance them out a bit with the bare spots.  I could have scraped the walls completely clean and re-textured them from scratch, but...nuh-uh.  Do not want. So my entire life was covered in purple dust with gold glitter in it for like a week. 

The Poop Cave cabinet doors had been stenciled with silver acrylic paint.  It was a pretty effect, but the cabinets needed cleaning and repair, and updating.  I sanded the doors smooth to knock down the edges of the stenciling, and just painted over it.  

I also removed the knobs and patched the holes.  Again - neat effect having them in the center of the doors, but it was way too high to reach comfortably. 

This is what I mean by a weirdly-shaped bathroom.  If I remember correctly, it was actually a huge rectangle, once - if you imagine away the closets and take the walls back into a more regular shape, and add a tub and separate shower.  At one point, the room was remodeled, and the tub and shower were replaced with a single, HUGE, walk-in shower with a bench, and these two closets.  It's actually a fantastic space to use, as odd as it seems.  I love having a bathroom large enough to walk around in; and the closet duo means that we have a ridiculous amount of space in which to store various linens and craft stuff (the master bedroom is our craft room, just like at the old house).  

The only thing I don't like is where the bathroom door and the Poop Cave doors meet up. That's just a recipe for smacking yourself in the face, that is. It may not be everybody's first choice, but, I took the door off the Poop Cave.  It's safer, door-smacking-wise, and lets more light into the bathroom from the window during the day. 

I love the way this color looks with both the silver fixtures and brushed-gold frames and accessories.  

And the mirror, apparently, since I re-did this room like three weeks ago and still haven't wiped off that paint smear.  

The floor tile (and shower tile) is a warm, yellow-beige, just like the vanity.  

The only other consideration I bothered with in mixing the color was that it be something that coordinated with my roommate's gorgeous cotton shower curtain from World Market.  We both love the way this works. 

The only thing I don't have a pic of (because my phone just *cannot* for some reason) is the ceiling.  Yeah, it's just white.  But when this room was remodeled umpteen years ago, the ceiling was never finished. Not all the seams were taped, the joint between the ceiling boards and the wall boards wasn't sealed, and there were still grease-pen markings all over the ceiling from the workers who cut and installed it - arrows and measurements and such.  The bathroom itself took me about three days, but one of those days was just the ceiling:  cleaning, sealing, taping & floating, caulking, priming, painting.  I used to get so MAD while I was taking a shower, looking up at those measurements. Now it's fresh and white and smooth.  Ahhhh. 

There are plenty more things, both done and yet to do.  I'm hoping over the weekend that I can at least post about a couple of smaller projects I've been working on, if not have a new, huge one to show you (I have five days off, after all).  

IN the meantime, happy holidays, if holidays are your thing. 

Finally: The Kitchen

Finally, a post!  Hi, I'm Laura, and it has been 152 days since my last post. Life got a little weird there for a while, and I sure as heck wasn't working on the house.  But I'm back at it, and since (a) people always congregate in kitchen at parties, and (b) my roommate's 40th birthday party is this coming weekend, I painted the kitchen*:

Here's the "breakfast nook" side of the kitchen, after painting.  The color is Glidden's "Fresh Thyme Green," matched to a broken shard of a beloved bowl, which served as the color inspiration.

Here's the old color - kind of a baby-duck-yellow, which is pretty, but I'm not a yellow person at all.

The color was old, as well - the walls were covered in weird little scrapes and mars, years of grime and spatters, and over two dozen various holes and gouges in the walls that had to be filled.

The tile guys never finished out the baseboards in the house when they installed them, either; so every room in this house has started with filling and caulking in all the baseboards and trim, and priming and painting it all, too.

There was also this little section of a gold/ochre colored paint on one side of the kitchen window.

Hmm.

Eventually, I need to clean and repaint the soffits above the kitchen cabinets, too. I'd remove them entirely and open up the room, but the soffits above the stove and sink contain pipes!  Oh, well.

I absolutely love this color.  All of our kitchen accessories were already this color, so just by changing the wall color, the entire room is transformed and brought together.  I also LOVE the way it looks with all the different wood tones in the room.

This is Bob.  Bob almost got squished because I thought he was a drop of paint.

My favorite view of the kitchen:  The coffee bar on a metal baker's rack, and the Ikea cabinet given to me by a friend a couple of years ago (I traded her for my old cabinet, actually, and we're both better off!).





















* I wavered, for a while, over whether to tackle the kitchen or the master bathroom first.  I opted for the kitchen, since I know people will be cycling through it all evening.  But then the toilet in the guest bath broke.  I had to order a specialty part from The Internet, which was supposed to arrive last week, but now isn't going to show up until the day before the party.  Can I get it fixed in time, or will our guests have to use the ugly, cramped, dingy master bathroom in the crowded, crappy master bedroom (craft room) instead?