Bedroom: Done

Finally! I know I've mentioned before that our bedroom was the last unfinished room in our house. When we bought our house, it was painted blue. Bright blue. Smurf blue.

You can see it behind Lissie here. Also, check out four year old Lissie--it's so strange to see her with all of her teeth!

It wasn't a bad color. It was actually very pretty, in some ways. It was just a very intense color, and I always felt kind of overwhelmed by it.

So I painted the room. I can't remember how long we'd lived here then, but under a year. I chose a pretty bluey-greeny-gray color (depending on the light) that every bedroom seemed to be around that time. I believe the exact color was Sherwin Williams Window Pane. And it was better. Sort of. It was definitely less intense, but one thing I didn't consider when choosing the color was that our north facing bedroom was already kind of gloomy. And in winter? Yuck. Seriously, it was cold, blah, and frankly, kind of depressing.

You can see it used in a sunny nursery on Apartment Therapy, where it's gorgeous. It doesn't even look like the same color.

Then I just kind of left it that way, for the next two years. Obviously, as you'll see in the other "before" photos, there was a lot more wrong with the room than just the paint color! But I knew I didn't love it, and I was never inspired to do anything with our room.

I finally took some pictures last month, and sent them to Ellen Kennon. I'm sure I've talked about her here before, because she's fabulous. She has helped me chose all of the paint colors in my house, and I don't know what I did before I knew about her--wait, I do know: I constantly repainted everything!

In my e-mail, I told Ellen that I wanted the room to feel warmer and cozier, and that I'd like a color that feels refreshing when I wake up in the morning. She sent back a list of five colors, and Brad and I quickly picked the one we wanted. Then, I ordered the paint, and due to a few mix ups, waited an agonizing month to get it.

And then, this:

So now when I wake up in the morning, instead of seeing this:

I see this:

The couch was moved to our porch, because nobody ever sat on it in our bedroom. This meant we could move the desk back to the other side of the room, across from the bed, which left space for us to bring the third dresser back up from the basement.

That gave me more drawer space--so no more t-shirts crammed in (and peeking out of) the drawers!

Ugh. Also, I moved a heap of "clean enough to wear again" clothes off the dresser before I took this picture:

Voila! No room for clothes:

Notice the pictures stacked under the dresser? I won't tell you how thick the layer of dust was, but I will tell you that there were more pictures stacked under the couch.

The blue plate is one of only two new things in this room. It's a "Pisces" (Brad's astrological sign) plate I found in a thrift store. I thought it was funny, and I liked the color, so I got it.

The other new thing is the gold branches on the wide dresser, also thrifted. Everything else was stuff I already had, and most of it was already in this room. It's crazy to me how different the room looks and feels, with just a few relatively simple (and cheap) changes. Unfortunately, it also means I really have no excuse for how bad it looked before!

Now, if I could just find the right curtains.