One of my great “salvations” from dwelling on sad things in my life is decorating our new-to-us home. We bought the place right before Christmas. It had been empty for about a year, so there was a LOT of work to do before we could move in. Finally, at the end of January, and with the help of some great friends and family, we boxed up our life again and started living there. We’ve been nomadic for a few years – we never went more than a few miles from place to place, but managed to move quite a few times. In fact, as I’m counting now, I moved ten times in eight years. Wow.
Anyway, I really enjoy the planning process and seeing a room or space transform. I’m a fairly creative person, and though my day job requires some creativity in pieces I’m writing, working for a corporation of course comes with some constraints. (I’m sure the good people of this company have no interest in my short stories or memoirs.) Working on our home allows me to flex the small creative muscles I have. Unfortunately, this also requires us to do some flexing of the wallet… and thus, the decorating process runs slowly as we begin to save for things like children and new water heaters.
In our previous, more temporary homes, I put an emphasis on making the “public” spaces look finished, and therefore never spent much time working on our bedroom. Our bedroom “set” was a mixture of pieces from our childhood rooms and college apartments. So when we bought this house, we decided that was the first place we should invest in. It’s on the first floor of the house, and if the door is open, the room is visible from the family room, hallway and dining room, so it seemed worthy to invest in making it nice.
Here’s what we had to work with in the beginning:
This isn't our room at all; this is the photo that was on the realtor's listing of the house so the furnishings belong to the previous owner.
Also, it's hard to tell here, but the walls are a sickly green.
We were left with those window shades,
and a random mirror that was glued to the wall.
Luckily, the floors are gorgeous!
They're in mint condition throughout the entire first floor.
Our to-do list included painting, removing previous window treatments, removing the mirror glued to the wall and a shelf that was above their old bed, and a seriously thorough scrubbing. However, this isn’t YoungHouseLove.com, so we don’t have photos of us doing those things. We don’t look happy when we paint and we don’t look cute when we clean. But we do take after photos.
We painted the walls a soft lilac color to play off the purples in our bedding.
We also invested in some great ceiling-to-floor curtains from Crate & Barrel.
They have a beautiful side-to-side grey/khaki/ivory ombre effect.
I was hesitant to go with an entire wall of curtains but we love it!
The bed is wrinkled and it bothers me, but everything had just come back from the dry cleaners and was still creased. The bedding is from Bed Bath & Beyond and the flower prints are from Ikea.
There's not a lot to see in this photo but our dog, Lulu :)
The curtains are from Target and they're a plum/lavender dip-dye.
All the furniture in the room is from Furniture Fair, except the lingerie chest in the last photo, which is from JC Penney.
I love our dresser, even with TJ's baseball cap sitting in the basket here :)
Also, the vase on the left belonged to my mother.
I'm trying to weave a small piece of her into each room.
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