Before + After

First Things First: Let’s Build a New Room

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A big part of deciding to move was the need for better home office space. Our new house has a finished basement, but Matt is apparently needy and wanted a window and actual natural light if he’s going to be working from home all day. Can you imagine?

In the House Tour I shared before I showed some awkward spaces upstairs that we planned on reworking and that was the first big project we decided to tackle. It’s a little hard to visualize from photos (especially since the hall closet was difficult to photograph, so here’s how the spaces were laid out when we moved in:

Not to scale

We discussed a few different options that included changing around the closet in the bedroom and adding a closet to the new room. These ideas led to complications involving vents and ceiling lights that we didn’t really want to deal with. Ultimately we followed Occam’s Razor theory and went with simplest solution:

Not to scale

To contain the mess a little bit, we started by building the new wall in the existing bedroom. We had to remove a strip of carpet and a strip of ceiling in order to add 2×4’s along the top and bottom. Because this is a pretty small project in the world of drywalling, we didn’t bother renting a drywall lift. Matt still decided to tackle a bunch of this while I was working in the office so he temporarily attached a brace to support the top piece of drywall while he screwed it into place.

Once the drywall was up, we demoed the wall between the closet and alcove.

After that was just patching, patching, and more patching. Walls needed new drywall, the ceiling needed new drywall + popcorn texture, the carpet needed to be filled in*… this was possibly the longest part of the whole process.

Most of the house is painted Sherwin Williams: Repose Gray and they had some left in the basement so we used that for now. Matt’s more or less in charge of this room and the bigger goal was having a functional space vs. and impeccably styled space. Heck, right now he still pretty much only has his desk in there (which fits perfectly in the alcove).

It may not be the most stunning visual makeover, but spatially it has been an awesome improvement to the house!

* My goal is to replace all the carpet sometime this year so we just patched in some leftover carpet from the basement. If a full carpet replacement wasn’t in our plans for the near future we would have come up with a better flooring solution.

Master Bedroom Reveal!

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Ooof, it’s been a while!  The master bedroom is finally done though!

Let’s take a look back at what we started with:

One of the major pros of this house was the room sizes; you rarely find 100+ year old homes with generous room sizes and the master bedroom was especially generous.

It was also very generous with the outlets–12 pairs (and all of them about 3′ off the ground)!

After moving in, it pretty much morphed into this:

And then stayed that way for a while as we focused on other projects. Whomp whomp

A little paint, some new furniture, and let’s see where we’re at today.

SO much better. It looks like adults actually live here now!

The headboard, nightstands, sconces, and rug are all at a much better scale.  The proper bed frame and drawers on the bedside tables add some much needed polish (it’s really nice to be able to stash things like deodorant, hairbrush, chapstick, etc out of view but still easily accessible). We also upgraded the outlets next to the bed to the fancy ones with the USB ports because we’re always charging phones and tablets on our nightstands.

I love the drama of the accent wall and it really helps highlight the bed (which is the pretty standard focal point in a bedroom). The pale green-blue-gray walls are wonderfully soothing.

I found the candle holder at World Market and had a beast of time getting it into my tiny little car, but here it is! The circle pattern compliments the sconces and the round mirror on the opposite side the room, and the bronze really pops against the teal wall.

Especially when working with cool colors (blues, greens, purples) adding a touch of warmth really helps balance out the space. I scored an amazing vintage dresser and then found some side tables in a similar tone at Target.  The pops of natural wood add so much more than sticking with all white furniture like we had previously.

Added bonus: the mid-century dresser paired beautifully with my Cherner chair. I literally pulled it out of a dumpster years ago! It works well in the bedroom because it gives me a place to stash a robe or PJs, but it’s not big enough to let a giant pile of laundry accumulate.

The rug seems a bit crazy, right? I absolutely love it though! A different color and pattern would have completely changed the entire feel of the room.  This one just seems to add a bit of playfulness and quirkiness that appeals to me.  Matt may try and argue that we’re fairly formal people, but I will always enjoy of pop of the unexpected.*

There are still some tweaks needed–the solid green pillows are a bit too intense and the print needs a new frame. I’m eyeing this print from Spoonflower for the pillows since the citron color pulls from the duvet and breaks up the mostly blue color scheme. My closet is also in need of a complete overhaul, but that will be a project for another time.

I am so glad we finally have a respectable bedroom! Especially since now that we’re done I can go back to working on the downstairs. Next up are going to be the living room and TV room. I’m looking forward to getting those done. I always have a little self-guilt whenever we have people over because half of our main entertaining space is decidedly meh which makes me look like a shitty designer…but you can’t do everything at once.

 

*I still can’t convince him to buy one of the reindeer heads from the vintage store down the street.  The fossilized rhino skull was also shot down, despite the fact that it could never be broken by cats or kids…some complaint about not paying $7k for a rock or something…