Master Bedroom Before and After

If you ever doubted the power of a gallon of paint, feast your eyes on our master bedroom so far...

We started with our boring off-white box...

Ikea bed, $10 decorator tables as side tables, naked windows, and too-small art...

Ikea dresser, too-big mirror, shiny brass doorknobs...

and one more cluttered Ikea dresser.

This is what the room looks like today - same furniture, different look.

Same Ikea bed, but I have now become a white bedding convert.  Better scale of art over the bed (moved from its original spot in our entry).  Big time (but still cheap) upgrades on the side tables and lamps, too.  The old steamer trunk moved from the hall back to the end of our bed.  It's hard to tell, but the valances have a stripe that somehow matches the paint EXACTLY and were a lucky clearance find at Belk (and that I found after we painted).

After a few room re-shufflings, the dressers switched places, but they're still working fine, so we're keeping them.  De-cluttered, though, and art rearranged to fit better.

Something still bugs me about this wall, but I'm not making any moves until I figure out what it is, exactly.

We also moved a bookshelf that had been in the living room before we re-arranged in there for the eleventieth time...  I'd forgotten how nice it is to have a bookcase in my room.

Besides the paint, there are a bunch of little details that make the room happy:

I turned a particleboard dresser from college into a way more functional side table for the Mr. By this time, the top was covered with water puckers, so I gave it a freshen up by taking off the top and replacing it with a stained plywood top, and added cute pulls.

I'm terrible at shelf staging, and I'm sure all this stuff will get rearranged a million more times.

Long ago (10 years or so), I fell in LOVE with this print, and cut it out of Blueprint magazine (anyone else still mourning that loss?) and put it in my inspiration binder (way before Pinterest, guys).  The only problem was, before I could come up with the money to buy it, the website stopped selling it.  I cried real tears.  

This Christmas, my sister-in-law scoured the internet and found a website that will happily print out of circulation art.  I opened it and cried real tears.  Now it's the first thing I see when I roll out of bed every morning.

My sister-in-law also gave us this trunk as a wedding present, and it hold all our precious stuff (yes, she is the best present-giver in the history of ever).  Every kid who has ever seen it has called it a treasure chest, and in a way, it really is.

Of course, it still has a way to go before it's "perfect."  Our Ikea furniture has held up great, except the bed is really squeaky if you lean against the headboard, and the dressers and bookshelf are kind of boring.  And as with every other inch of grubby carpet, we'd love to replace it with easy to clean hardwoods one day.

I will take no flack for bedroom ceiling fans - I would LOVE a fancy chandelier, but we live in the South, and the bedrooms are on the third floor - I don't want to be personally responsible for our own ozone hole making the rooms sleep-able in August.  Also, last year our AC imploded entirely, and we were SO THANKFUL for the fans.  That said, I'd like a prettier one than "the cheapest one Lowe's had in 2007" model we have now.


So a little paint and a few small, personal additions have made our bedroom a cozy, restful place.  Anyone else feeling the power of small changes?

Bedside Bookshelf

The Kiddo reads books until he falls asleep, which is great (bedtime independence, hooray), but it means there are piles of books right by his pillow, which is less great.

Usually, there are even more books taking over the bed...

Luckily, I had a bunch of spare trim we used in the closet on another project, and 1x1 wood in the garage, so I quickly cobbled together a cute solution.

Even though I got a very lovely compound miter saw for my birthday, the garage workbench hasn't been set up yet, so neither has it...  I had to bust out the crummy old miter box for some simple straight cuts, and it worked just fine with my favorite pull saw.

Because the garage is a mess while we reorganize to accommodate and build the workbench, I had to get creative about miter box placement.  Don't try this at home.

A kind of dumb place to set the miter box, but it worked out OK in the end.

After I made my cuts, I clamped and glued the two pieces together.

After the glue dried for a few minutes, I put in some nails, and inset them with a nail set.

I filled the holes with some putty I had laying around, and sanded with a medium-grit sanding block that was literally just the first one I grabbed off the shelf.

I painted the whole thing (2 coats) with the same trim paint that we've used everywhere else in the house, using my new favorite, no-brush-marks-ever, foam brush.

I let it dry, then hauled it up and placed the shelf and leveled.

The whole thing, even fully loaded, is really light, so I used some small brackets that didn't work in another project, but were just right here.  Yes, that's right, friends, I am a hardware hoarder.

I used the same screw-in anchors I used for the baseball bat holder for the screws that attach the brackets to the wall, just in case the Kiddo gets any designs on pulling the shelf out along with a book.  Again, probably overkill, but better safe than patching drywall, I always say.

and TA-DA, a tidy bedtime book shelf.