Tag: bedroom

Bedroom.

Truly, I couldn’t come up with something funny and/or non-creepy to title this post about the bedroom.

For many, many months after we moved in, this continued to be my least favorite room in the house. The paint color and the grey comforter we had in the old place clashed, clashed, clashed. Fighting shades of gray are almost as bad as fighting shades of black. So, one temporary comforter and one new West Elm comforter later, things started shaping up. We removed the headboard and made the room feel way bigger. I finally love this room :)

First, a shot right after we moved in. It will make you understand why the room made me so depressed:

Second, in case you were wondering: we did not paint! Natural light works wonders. Unfortunately the room gets natural light pretty much only while we’re at work. Anyway, getting rid of the headboard and hanging cream curtains helped, but the temporary comforter was NOT what the doctor ordered:

Now:

Now, I feel like gray, cream, and white can coexist in a small space, with the blue pattern on the comforter playing referee between the three neutrals. The yellow helps lighten the mood! Across from the foot of the bed is our IKEA dresser. Believe it or not, the dresser was easier to assemble than the wardrobe we bought the same day! Here’s a shot:

Here’s the view of the wardrobe (hanging those doors and making sure they were even was the WORST!). The doorway at the left edge of this photo leads to the hall :) I’d like to get more globes to fill up the top of the wardrobe like you see on home interior blogs sometimes. Haven’t come across any while thrifting lately, though!

And a little source list, since I ended up the guest room tour that way… I like to try to prove that a house can look stylish on the cheap. This room, by FAR, we have put the most money into. The mattress, bedside tables, wardrobe and dresser were all bought new. A mattress is not really something you want to buy used, and it is impossible to find dressers at the limited options of thrift stores we have here. These items are, however, more or less the ONLY furniture items purchased new in our house so far!

  • Bed, rather, mattress and box spring on the floor, from Ashley Furniture
  • Comforter, West Elm organic ironwork duvet cover, snagged on SALE for $65. (Can also be seen on the not-very-funny new show Are You There Chelsea?)
  • Wardrobe, IKEA ENGAN $179
  • Dresser, IKEA TRONDHEIM. I guess it doesn’t come in 6-drawer anymore? I think it was somewhere around $175.
  • Bedside tables, Target (Wedding gift cards! Woo! Don’t remember how much they were.)
  • Yellow pillows, Dwell Studio for Target. I waited years for these to finally go on clearance! $17 ea.
  • Curtains, Target $24 per pair (3 pairs, ordered online to get the extra length)
  • Chair with green cushion, found for F-R-E-E at the re-use shed at the dump, reupholstered with materials from JoAnn.
  • Tennis Racquets, thrifted, $3 for 3.
  • Red lamp & burlap shade, both from target, somewhere around $30 together?
I am not putting the dollar signs in to show off how much we’ve spent/invested (depending on your POV). What I’m trying to show is that, minus the mattress (which rang in somewhere around $600 I think?) the room was well below $1000, which seems to be the approximate amount TV shows budget to redo a room “on the cheap.” Personally, I feel like the room looks great, and I’m not sure putting more money into it would even improve on it. What do you think?

There you have it! Questions? Comments? Favorite part? Mine is (obviously) the duvet cover :)

Advertisement

Gettin’ Low

Remember those blog resolutions I made about making sure to take more “before” and “during” photos to make my posts better? Remember how it was just a couple weeks ago that I proclaimed them to the world? I have been getting better as evidenced by my recent drawer clean-up, but, um, we made a change and forgot to shoot “before” pictures. Wop wop. Any habit takes time to develop, though. Anyway! Moving onward. No time to cry over unshot photos.

When we got married my parents got us a basic Hollywood bed frame to get the mattress and box spring off the floor–the below photos shows the setup from our old place, before we got our queen-sized mattress and with the bed at full height. It was perfect at the old apartment because the room itself was GIANT and everything had plenty of room to hang out. This particular bedspread (a “full/queen size,”) hit the floor and hid the Hollywood frame and all our under-bed storage. The bed scooted around, but not as much. I think the rug helped.

Unfortunately, with both Doug’s and my parents being “carpet people” we had never anticipated that on hardwood floors the wheeled bed frame would scoot all over the room, all the time. I am only slightly exaggerating.

You see, on carpet, it’s hard to move things. Especially with thick carpet where everything settles down into nice little divots that are a pain to get out of the carpet after rearranging furniture. On hardwoods, moving things is so easy. Now, add wheels to the object in question and you are in for a life of constantly repositioning furniture. Yes, even with the wheels in “locked” position! Take a simple act like sitting down on the bed to put shoes on. Scooooooooooot. How about when Mosey runs into the room at full speed and leaps on the bed with a toy in his mouth? Scooooooooooot. You get the picture. Tired of moving the bed back against the wall and/or squeezing through my measly walkway between the bed and the windows (the bed and subsequently the nightstand were totally scooted as far into the corner as possible) I decided to take executive action. Mattress, box spring, meet my friend, floor.

“Effortlessly styled to look lived-in” or “Messy room” …you decide.

Happily, losing those few inches and ditching the headboard actually makes the room seem much bigger. Considering the height of Doug’s wardrobe and the dresser (which is really close to the bed–the room is small), having the bed at full height made the room feel super crowded. Having lowered it gives the space, well, space and adds a sort of relaxed, bohemian vibe. At first I though Doug would object, seeing how he’s a million feet tall, maybe crouching all the way down to the floor would be an inconvenience for him–but he likes it too. And now it scoots around but only an inch or so at a time. It is so nice.

I’ll write up some more info on the bedspread presto-change-o at another time! :)

What do you think? 

PS: both of the couches in our living room are constantly scooting around the room all the time as well. Any advice/tips for keeping furniture put on wood/tile floors?

Unpermanent

So, for the longest time, I’ve been having issues with what to put above the headboard in the bedroom. That is, what’s cheap to put above the headboard in the bedroom.

First, we had a map of New York City in a frame we got for our wedding, but the proportion was killing me. The wide bed+bedside tables and wide wall really deserves something with a more horizontal nature to it. Image below: awful, right?

So, I had the courageous idea to do a New York skyline mural on the wall. In my first inspiration board, which this room is loosely based on, I’d envisioned a headboard cut out to look like a skyline. I still think it would be totally awesome.

For my skyline, I looked up some stylized NY skyline prints and adapted one onto my wall in pencil, then taped it off with blue tape with the plan to paint it. It was around this time that I started sending out lots of job applications to outside states, and we got our new landlords and Mosey, so I put off painting… and put it off, and put it off.

(Photo taken Sunday: bed not even pretending to be made) I think it would have looked really cool, I was just too hesitant to do something too permanent to a rental that, when I did it, we could have moved out on short notice. Now, a few months later, I know I could’ve done it because we obviously haven’t gone anywhere. Guess I’m starting to dig in my heels for a little while longer.

Sick of the blue tape, I took it all down (carefully, because I think the wall is in fact painted-over wallpaper, which likes to peel off) and put up some of the extra antique postcards I got in preparation for our wedding guestbook (we had guests write us a note on the back and we keep them in a box). I tried out a couple of different patterns flat on the bed before they went up on the wall.

It’s not perfect, but the arrangement meets our color scheme (sort of–I mean there is a fair amount of green, and the blue goes with the blue baseboards and curtains–features of the room chosen by previous tenants that we’ve just left as-is). It’s wider than it is tall, although I could add one more “layer” around the edge to give it a grander scale–I just don’t have postcards that look like the rest (I tried to stick with illustrations rather than photos for a more antique feel). I used sticky tack, for the first time since my freshman year of college, since I didn’t want to do anything permanent to the cards and would feel guilty putting that many holes in the wall.

Here’s another shot, closer up and from a fancy-schmancy angle:

My favorite is the first one directly to the left of the two vertical Chicago cards. It’s a view of Shelter Island and San Diego bay as seen from Point Loma! So cool that I found that old card in Kansas :)

What do you think?