Bedroom Refresh

One of my most important goals in the past few months has been to refresh our bedroom before my due date (in 4 days!), followed by the nursery, and I’m so happy that we achieved both in the past month! I wouldn’t say that either room is “finished,” but they have both undergone a huge transformation!

I’ll post about the nursery another time, but today I wanted to share photos of our bedroom. I can’t believe I have no good before photos of this room, but I was so eager to get started that I just … started. Below, you can see the wallpaper that covered all the walls.

The hard wood floors were also still covered in carpet that didn’t come up in our first round of carpet-banishing last year. The carpet was a cream color, which of course, does not age well (especially if you have a dog!).

I tried to remove the wallpaper with a steamer, and you can see the results of two hours of work below!

Multiple layers of wallpaper and paint were firmly adhered to the wall by a thick skim coat that someone had done before the last layer of wallpaper, so it was really impossible to remove. Then, I found paneling on one of the walls, and the steamer was actually melting the top layer of paneling into the layer of wallpaper! So, I quickly decided it would make more sense to patch up the spots that I had already tried to remove with a light skim coat and paint over everything. In other areas in the house where the wallpaper situation was bad, we put thin sheet rock over the plaster. But we are not ready to undertake that massive project in our bedroom at the moment (way too much dust/mess/work for right before a baby arrives!).

Even though it’s not a permanent fix, I love the way the paint changed the feeling of the room! With only one window and the buttery cream trim and old-fashioned wallpaper, the room constantly felt dark, and like it wasn’t really “ours.” The color we used is Benjamin Moore’s Polar Ice, which is a pale gray that reads as a green or blue in different lights. It has brightened up the room so much, along with the bright white trim. We also removed the carpet (and a million carpet tack strips and staples! the worst.) and scrubbed the wood floors which made the room seem a million times bigger and so much cleaner. The floors will need to be refinished eventually, but for now we will probably put a rug in there and live with the small imperfections.

Everything we used for decor was already in our house, minus one of the lamps (from the Threshold line at Target but I can’t seem to find them online) and the gold necklace stand.

One of the biggest tasks in refreshing this room was to get things organized. I put up three command hooks for hat storage, cleaned out so many bags of clothing after reading The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and we ripped out everything in our closet and rebuilt it to give us more than 4 times the storage! (full closet post to come). The organization might feel even better than the refreshed decor.

After upgrading from a full to a queen mattress a few months ago, we were sleeping on just the mattress and box spring until I chose a bed frame! It was so uncomfortable as I went into my third trimester. I really wanted an upholstered platform bed but we had just purchased the box spring and I didn’t want to commit to one too quickly because they can be pricey. So when I saw this tutorial to upholster a box spring and add legs, I was sold! We made a frame on the bottom first using old 2×4 scraps.

Then I upholstered the sides using a staple gun (on the bottom) and hand stitching (on the fabric top). I used scraps of a clean canvas drop cloth I had used for another project. Then, we just added simple legs from Home Depot, which I left unfinished because I like how they look against the canvas.

All dressers are vintage. The two painted dressers were painted with Valspar’s Wet Pavement.

Our bedroom gets the moodiest, shifting light. Before, it made the room seem kind of depressing, but now it looks so pretty and restful at different times of the day.

I love how the blue of the hallway doors complements the colors in the room. The crib is this one from Amazon, all ready for our little one to sleep in very soon. We will move it into his room after the first few months, but we thought the transition might be easier if he sleeps in it from the beginning.

I made the ikat throw pillows from some scrap fabric I had, using this tutorial (SO easy). The fur pillow was made from a $5 secondhand fur coat that our coonhound Leia destroyed when she was a puppy.

We really love the way the bedroom came out! It is so peaceful to be in there now, and it stays so much more neat now that everything has a place (mind-blowing, I know). We can’t wait to bring our new addition home to this room. And, I now have a very strong argument for fixing up bedrooms FIRST in any new house we might find ourselves in!