Master bedroom love.

This really is the slowest renovation in history, but that's okay.  I'm learning patience. 

The dressers only took three weeks to finish!  ONLY.  Ha.  The bulk of the work was done in about five or six hours - just sanding down imperfections, roughing up the surface and then applying a coat of primer and two coats of white paint.  Then hubby applied some spray paint lacquer that didn't take well (think stripes of lacquer) so he applied some polyurethane over it.  The hardware was perfect as is (to me) so nothing was needed there.  I can't believe I forgot a before picture of these suckers, but I did.  Trust me when I say they were in bad shape!

So here we are now.  The bedroom is getting better, slowly but surely.

 

We still need a headboard, some floating bedside tables, some pretty fabric-covered cornice boxes on the windows like we did in Adalyn's room so that I can drop the curtains to the floor and some wall art.  We have a rug, it just hasn't been moved in yet.  I'm now debating changing the bedset/wall color.  Now that I've moved the dressers in the room and am seeing it come together, I think I might be okay keeping the gray paint because it works well with our bedset/curtains.  I don't know.  I'm the most indecisive person alive, so my mind will change 85 times before this project is done.  We'll see!

Well, that's everything for now.  :)

Master bedroom UPDATE!

Well my ultimate dream is now to turn our master bedroom into a master suite thanks to an awesome friend, Megan, who is also an interior designer and drew up some plans for me.  And hubs and I are seriously considering it.  It would involve giving up our playroom, though, and knocking out the wall between our room and the playroom as well as walling in a few spots and cutting out a hole in the bathroom wall to make a new door.  But it'll probably be at least a year before we can accomplish something like this.  Realistically, more like two.  We'd have a WALK-IN closet, though, and an attached bathroom!  Oh, how I've missed both of those!

Anyway, for now, I'm focusing on what we can do.  Last weekend I picked up a few trinkets when I went on a girl's shopping day out excursion.  One of them ended up being my color inspiration for the wall and I went and picked up the paint tonight.  I've snagged a big cream rug and TWO old dressers which I'll be refinishing this weekend.  I doubt I'll have time to refinish the dressers and paint the bedroom, but I can dream, right?  So I'm scratching the idea for a vanity/desk and instead we'll have his and hers dressers.  And the wall color is a little different than I was originally envisioning, but I love this more!  It flows really well with the other colors in our house and is pretty much the exact color of the drapes in our dining room, which is right off the bedroom.  Plus I think it's the exact romantic feeling color I was after.



Stay tuned for some after pictures at the end of the weekend!

And the winner is...

...option A!



I kind of like this whole, "let the blog readers choose the theme" thing.  Less responsibility for me when it's all said and done, right?  If it turns out horrid, I can be all, "I didn't pick it!  The BLOG READERS picked it!"  I kid, I kid.

But hopefully it won't.  Hopefully it'll be the cozy little charmer I'm envisioning.  I did some more playing around on Olioboard.com (where the moodboards came to life) and have customized option A a little bit.  Kind of like a compromise.  I might change things up, but I am seriously wanting white furniture.  I guess because I've had a dark bedroom for so long that I'm now going for the other extreme.





I can't wait to get started, but it's going to be a slooooow process since we're not shelling out a bunch of money at once.  This'll be a good lesson in patience for me.

In other news, I started blog #2 which will be really boring for the most part because it's just my glorified food diary put online for accountability.  But if anyone else is dieting or feels like cheering me on/reprimanding me, here you are (I'm putting recipes up, too)!

Mood Boards

Alright, I'm still stumped over here.  I know a lot of you mentioned I'd regret the white duvet because of the dirt, but our master bedroom really is (aside from the newborn stage) a kid-free zone most of the time.  Plus it's a duvet, so easily washable.  PLUS...I almost prefer it to black, which shows lint, fuzz and dog hair like whoa.  But in the interest of saving money, I love the idea of keeping our current duvet.  And a big plus here is that having a white duvet would allow for a quick and easy change when I got tired of the current color scheme.  Just toss some new throw pillows on the bed and a few accent pieces and the room would look brand new.

I really loved the idea of making curtains out of that fabric I have now become almost obsessed with, but when I realized it's $15/yd and that it would cost me almost $175 in fabric alone, I sadly bid adieu to that idea.

So.  That brings us to these options:

A:



Picture the chair covered with my beloved fabric, as well as a throw pillow or two in said fabric.  The room would be painted the background color.  I am super excited about the idea of having some swing-arm lamps above the bed or maybe just these fixed wall lamps (bottom left corner).  Either way, I haven't been able to stop thinking about them since seeing them on Young House Love here.

B:



Ah, my turquoise pick!  Definitely less soft and romantic, but bright and fun which I dig.  The background color would, again, be the wall paint color, which is basically the current color so I probably wouldn't even change it.  I really love grey these days, I just need lots of white and other bright colors to balance out the darkness of the grey.  Right now, with grey walls and black curtains and a black duvet, it's just TOO DARK.  I suppose I could probably even keep our current duvet with this option, huh?

C:



And here's the cheapest of all options, keeping our current duvet.  I don't know if you can tell, but in the bottom right corner, there's a picture of a floating bedside table.  Tim is making us a couple, no matter which option we choose.  I love them and they'll save space, something we really need.  And it's probably obvious by now, but the background blue would be the color I paint the walls.

So, what's your favorite?  Please help me out and vote.  :)

Snazzing up the master bedroom: color selection

Here's where I get SUPER stumped.  The whole color thing.  I always fall in love with a color (or color scheme), slap it on a wall and sulk.  If I were made of money and liked painting more, I'd probably re-paint a wall six times before I was happy with it.  I'm working with two different color schemes and I don't have a clue which one to go with.  All I know is that I like blue.  Help!

First things first, as long as we can get some needed tools, Tim will be building us this bed, courtesy of Ana White:

The bottom will be white, but I'm wanting to do a fabric headboard.  I am SO IN LOVE with this fabric I found on fabric.com:

Because I'm no good at matching prints, I have no idea if our current duvet will look good with this fabric.  Here's our current duvet.  Thoughts?

I'm thinking no, but sometimes I just don't have an eye for stuff like that.  I'm SO in love with this fabric that I'm debating getting a white duvet cover just to make this fabric headboard work.  Plus I love, love, love the hotel all-white thing.  So something like this:

For the wall color, I know that I definitely want to go with either this grey (quicksilver by Sherwin Williams):

Or this one (north star by Sherwin Williams):

Then I would paint the dresser (that we hopefully eventually get) white and sew up a few throw pillows in that same fabric or with a blue in that family.  I'd tie in some white curtains and a cream rug I've been drooling over with some small splashes of blue throughout the room.

So that's option one.  We're basically working with this scheme, which I love because it's soft and romantic and light:

Or we have option two.  Turquoise-ish/light blue!  It's probably my all-time favorite color and I think this next scheme would make the room really bright and fun, but I can't decide if I can let go of the "romantic" thing I'm after if it means getting my turquoise.  Here's the color I'm really drooling over:

(I have searched high and low and cannot for the life of me find the blog that I found this dresser on!  I am so sorry I can't give the credit where it's due - isn't it gorgeous?!)

In this case I'd keep our current bed set, slap up a white (or maybe turquoise if I'm feeling brave) headboard, stick with the same color walls and curtains as in the above scenario but paint the dresser the blue color and sew up some turquoise throw pillows for the bed. 

So we have this color scheme:

So do I go with soft & romantic or less romantic but bolder and more fun?

Keeping it really real: snazzing up the master bedroom.

Our master bedroom could probably win an award for least glamorous master bedroom to have ever existed.  It's currently worse than normal because we have a newborn rooming in and along with her came an ugly changing table.  But even on a good day, our master bedroom is my least favorite room to be in.  It's just...blah.  In the world of priorities, this comes last.  Obviously.

I'm a little embarrassed to be putting this out there, but I'm just transparent enough to do it.  Plus I need help.  I'm not good at the design-y stuff and I need to do this very cheaply.  We don't have a line item in the budget for decorating which is the biggest reason our room looks like this to begin with.  I'm dedicating the next few months to redoing this room, though, and I need to get it done as cheaply as humanly possible.  So like Adalyn's nursery, most everything will need to be a DIY project.  And I'm very, very, very open to ideas here.  When we do have our room back to ourselves, I want it to be cozy and snuggly and romantic.  I want it to be a place I enjoy being.

Okay, enough suspense, let's just get to the pictures, shall we?  These are horrible pictures because we have bad lighting in this room, especially in light of the fact that one window is covered with...a bed sheet.  Yeah, that's embarrassing.  Like I said, this room is our last priority.

Welcome to our (tiny) master bedroom:

Take note of the ugly changing table, the basket full of cloth diapers, the super old & ugly fan, the space heater and a whole bunch of cords all crammed in one little corner of our tiny room.  Glamorous, no?

To our right, you'll find the bed sheet curtain (long story short is that when we switched rooms, we somehow lost the extra curtain rod for our other curtain and we haven't gotten around to buying a new one yet), our cheap Target dresser that has not fared well (in other words, the bottom of the dresser drawers are literally falling out), a whole bunch of junk on our dresser and a mismatched bed set (in my defense, it normally isn't so bad but our matching duvet is in the dryer):

Like I said, it's normally not this bad.  Picture a black duvet with matching flowers.  Actually, I'll do you one better.  Here it is.

Oh, and we don't have bedside tables.  We did, but our room is too small to fit them in, so we have this antique table from Tim's grandmother on my side:

And, ahem, a Rubbermaid container on poor Tim's side.  If you could see me right now, I'm blushing.  And yes, we clearly have a baby with a cold on our hands.

Oh, and then here's my current "sewing area."  This is exactly why I'm not sewing right now.

And maybe you can get a good feel of how small our space is with this picture.  And funny sidenote: I was looking forward to not being pregnant anymore so that I didn't have to lug around a baby with me every second of every day.  But as this picture proves, turns out I'm still lugging around a baby with me every second of every day.  This is the only way I can get anything done with this fusspot.  

So there you have it.  Isn't it lovely (cue Stevie Wonder)?  I have tons of ideas brewing in my head that I'll share with each reno stage.  Because this project will have many reno stages over many months.