Master Bedroom Makeover
It was no 24-hour makeover, no magical before-and-after transformation like the ones you see on TV. Things kind of moved at a glacial pace. That's ok, though, and I think we're finally done!
We bought this house in 2004; it's about 1800 sq. feet, three bedrooms, on about half an acre of land in Albuquerque, NM. Little by little, we've been doin' stuff to it, and to this room so far we have: had oatmeal-colored carpeting replaced with red oak flooring; had custom closet shelving installed; painted the walls blue and the ceiling cream; replaced the ceiling fan; added new window treatments; bought a bed frame & mattress (our first purchased new just for us, not a hand-me-down!); nightstands and lamps. And framed & hung art on the walls. (One piece of art is a watercolor print of a nekkid woman, and you can see it in some of the photos. I doubt it's NSFW, but here's your warning).
So please come inside, where you'll see lots of befores and afters, from the way it looked the day we bought it, to the wood flooring installation, to the closet installation, to painting and the getting it the way it looks now in the above photo. Also, did I mention there are lots of photos?
Let us begin at the beginning: July 2004
This is how it looked as we were moving in. Once the house was ours, first order of business was getting that carpet out, and wood floors in.
Two months later, Project: Wood Floor Installation! began. It was a major undertaking, as this is a two-story house, and wood floors were put in throughout, on both levels. We lived upstairs first while the downstairs was being worked on, and then reversed it when it was time to work on the upstairs.
Oct. 2004
No more carpet! The steps will be redone. They were literally too short to put your feet on in a normal way. You had to walk sideways to get up and down. Also, one side was collapsing in. Note metal register; it will be replaced with a wooden one.
Avert your eyes, it's the horrifying linoleum stripe! It went all the way down the stairs.
Stripe or no stripe, it was so exciting to finally rip that upstairs carpet out. Both of us love wood floors, and after seeing how gorgeous the downstairs looked with them, we couldn't wait for the upstairs to get the same treatment. Unfortunately, there was one member of the family who was not happy about it. Our dog Tobi loved the comfy carpeting and lamented its loss. He followed its removal from room to room. Finally, it got down to the very last bit of carpet in the entire house, which was in the master bedroom closet. He clung to it till the very last second. Here he is shooting laser beams out of his eyes in the hopes that it would distract us from our task. It did not. So to make up for its loss, we got him and our other dog, Tasha, spiffy new dog beds.
This closet is the biggest in the entire house. Its ineffectual metal wire and odd wooden shelves drove me crazy. They had to go.
Wood floors! 1st photo: racked, 2nd photo: nailed down, filled & sanded, 3rd photo: stained & sealed!
The steps, getting fixed:
Finished! No more ugly linoleum! The guys from Kimbrough-Carpenter who installed these floors did an amazing job.
A few months after the floors went in, we had a closet designed & installed. It was worth every penny, especially as it's the only decent closet in the entire house.
January 2005
First, we painted it. Top photo: Tinted primer, with Behr Athenian Green topcoat being cut in. Below, finished, with new pewter lightswitch cover, and old light fixture.
Finished, with the drawer pulls I'd chosen, and a new light fixture. The drawers serve as my dresser, since I don't have one.
Shelves up top go around the entire closet for more storage.
Room for shoes, and long hanging things, and more shelves. We really managed to get a lot of storage in this space.
And then...nothing much else happened with this room for a while. Here's what it looked like, more or less, for the next couple of years.
Oct. 2006
The wood floors and new closet were wonderful, but the cold white walls with their spackly spots were really getting to me. It just felt too open and boring and...white...in there. Hated the plastic blinds and weird vertical blinds on the sliding glass door. The hand-me-down bed was increasingly uncomfortable. We'd never had a brand new mattress or a bed frame that was just for us. Or proper nightstands. Or proper bedside lamps. There on the left is a table his grandfather made and while it's really pretty, it's a bit small. On the right is an unattached glass circle on top of a rattan base, which we'd had since college. College was a long time ago. Fond memories of that glass table, but I was ready for something better.
February 2007
Time to break out some paint! But what color? With such a huge room, there were so many possibilites. We looked at paint chips and tossed around ideas for months. Finally, I bought some samples and began applying them to see what they'd look like in various spots in the room, in various lighting situations. Ultimately we went with Behr Frost in eggshell for the ceiling, and Behr Blue Willow in eggshell for the walls. I did as much of the preparation & painting by myself as I could. No problems with the shorter side of the room, but the other side is extremely tall and even a 16' ladder didn't go all the way to the top. One fateful day, when I was alone, I was bound and determined to be brave, climb up the thing, and paint. ::cue music that indicates impending disaster::
There, in the left corner, was where The Stoooopid Accident occurred. I'd laid out a painters cloth on the wood floors as usual, and had taken time placing the ladder. As carefully as I could, I climbed up it to begin cutting in the corners by the ceiling. And then...there was a horrifying feeling of the feet sliding out backwards underneath me. I don't think I'll ever forget that sound, the sound of the cloth sliding. I was Stoooopid, and didn't think about how the ladder would slide on that cloth which was on a slippery wood floor, and apparently the critical thinking knob in my brain was in the off position. The other ladders I'd been using, you see, were of the two-sided variety, and therefore, didn't slip. Anyway. It started so slowly I didn't quite grasp what was happening, then realized that ladder was coming down and wasn't going to have enough time to climb down it before it hit the floor. I didn't really fall off the ladder so much as I rode it down and landed on top of it on my knees and arms. My left arm got the brunt of it; I was bruised and swollen massively from elbow to fingertips, and in other places on my body. Of course all I could think of was the floor, the beautiful floor, now splattered with paint! Somehow I got it all cleaned up whilst simultaneously freaking out, calling my husband, and trying not to look too hard at my arm. His parents live near by and came to help me till he got home. I was fine, eventually, nothing broken, except my will to ever get on a ladder that tall again. He had to finish the painting and even to this day I cringe whenever I have to hold a ladder like that while he climbs up it. He also sanded and restained the window ledges and room divider ledge in addition to finishing the painting.
We'd decided to put in a new ceiling fan, and I sewed a cover for the skylight. It had been enjoyable at night; I liked lying in bed looking up at the stars, or at the moon. But every month we'd be woken by the full moon shining in like a celestial flashlight. And during the day, the sun would blaze in, in a very annoying sort of way. It's much nicer now, I think. Though I do sometimes miss looking up and seeing Orion perfectly framed there.
And most significantly of all, we'd purchased new furniture to go in after the painting was finished. I'd spent a lot of time looking for furniture online, and at catalogs, and going to furniture stores, thrift stores, yard sales. At last, I found a bed frame and mattress that we both loved. Also bedstands, which were advertised as being for readers; perfect for us and all the books! Over the next 2 years, more things were slowly added: lamps, clocks, and various other things.
The last pieces of the puzzle fell into place over the course of this year, such as blinds made for the not-exactly-standard-sized windows above the bed and across from the bed. For the past 2 years we'd had nothing on the window over the bed, and a bedspread, college-student style, over the window across from the bed, and simple white curtains on a flimsy spring rod over the sliding glass door. I finally decided on brown velvet curtains and sheers for the sliding glass door, and a steel double curtain rod to hang them on. Once the windows were properly covered, everything suddenly felt a whole lot more together. Framed some art & hung it on the walls, and it felt even more together. Got a duvet cover for the down comforter, and then that was it! There's still a few little things I want to do, maybe put more art on the walls, but I'm sticking a fork in it and calling it done for now.
The main idea for this room was to have a sort of a travel theme, and to have it feel like an oasis, a retreat of restful modern warmth. A room that reminds us of some of the wonderful places we have traveled to and would like to travel to again in the future. The blue and white paint colors kind of reflect for me the blue skies and white clouds we see out our windows most every day, and also convey tranquility and peace. It certainly feels a lot warmer and more restful in there now. It also feels more like a "grown-up" room, or at least, less like a hand-me-down room.
Ok, I admit it. I've probably been watching too many home decorating shows on HGTV.
So, finally, here it is, circa September 2009:
The art above the bed: prints I bought, already matted, in London this past April. They're reproductions of vintage advertisements for the Tube and the London theatre. I framed them when we got home from our trip. Because we rode the Tube a lot, and went to the Theatre one night (to see Wicked, on our anniversary), they seemed like the perfect mementos of our fun adventures. Also, my idea of the travel theme was "vintage" travel, meaning, as it used to be, not necessarily as it is now, so they fit in with that as well.
I love these window blinds. They can be raised and lowered top-down, or bottom-up. In the above photo, they are bottom up, in the below photo, top-down. The art on either side of the window in the below photo: I bought a calendar two years ago of vintage travel advertisements, had mats cut for two of the pages, and framed them. They're prints advertising Italy; I chose them to reflect our trip to Italy in 2002. While we didn't go to the Amalfi coast, we did go to Venice.
I adore these nightstands. They hold lots of books! I also love the Aladdin lamps; it took forever to find lamps I actually liked.
The print of the nekkid woman is not travel themed, nor is she new to this room, but she does evoke the idea of retreat and relaxation, and the print colors reflect the room colors. And it's a favorite print by a favorite artist, Steve Hanks.
I found a clouds lightswitch cover, which sort of matches the clouds skylight cover.
Here are the blinds down, and a view of the bathroom (which we haven't done anything with since we moved in--it dearly needs work) and my study.
The antique dresser was my grandmother's. It's actually a sideboard, I think, but my husband uses it for his clothes and stuff now.
I've bought some vintage travel stickers from exotic locations and originally meant to decoupage them onto the luggage, to give them that world traveler feel. Can't decide if that would look good or not. I've never decoupaged anything, so I'm afraid I'd mess it up. Although the luggage pieces match, I got them at different times, from eBay, just for this room, to evoke the idea of old-fashioned travel. Heyduke the Bear does not fit in with any sort of "theme". He's been hanging out with me since college days and I'm too sentimental to let go of him just yet.
The art on the above left is a print we bought from an artist selling them on the street in Venice, Italy, in 2002. It has been rolled up in a tube ever since we got back...finally, this summer, I got it framed and hung it up. The others are those Tube station prints. I love the one of Neptune most of all.
The blue matted prints above the bookcase next to the closet are another travel memento, from Bisbee, Arizona.
The balcony is decidedly unsaucy; it is in dire need of work. But it does provide us with some great views!
I've never had an orchid before. I've been wanting one for this room for years, though, and finally just got one.
And here's the front of the house.
Thanks for stopping by!
P.S. My thanks to honeywest for her extremely helpful tutorial on making photo collages. This was my first attempt at making these; I hope they look ok!
P.P.S. If you'd like to see another room in this house, see this post, about the living room dolled up for Christmas 3 years ago. Or this one, about my husband's study, from last year. We're still doing stuff to the house. More posts in the future, I hope...
P.P.P.S. Since originally posting this, I decided to replace those photo collages with a blue background and white text with collages with a white background and no text. Some people said they had a hard time reading the text & the color was distracting. So I decided to change them out. I also replaced & added some photos. I'm sure I didn't absolutely need to do that, but here they are anyway. :-)