(Obscure Beach Boys reference for those of you keeping track....)
I promised a post about the bedroom make over. Yep, we pulled a "Changing Rooms". We swapped houses with ourselves, and re-did our bedroom. Boy were we surprised when we opened our eyes ;-)
Before we moved into the house, what, 5 years ago? We painted every last wall inside the place. Vicki was tired of living in white-walled places, and we picked some nice colors everywhere. And there was thought and time put into decorating everywhere... Except our bedroom. Silly, you start and end your day there. It really ought to be a nice place.
It was a moss green -- Vicki loves that color, and we actually did have a bedspread we bought to go with it -- a little flowery... I never liked it a lot, nor did I dislike it. It was just there. Even had a shower curtain that matched. And I'd bought some antique rose prints at Inside Outlet that went with the bedspread ok. But no serious thought was ever given to furniture arrangement, and it was just a room with a bed in it. A nice bed, with nice bedroom furniture. A set, even. Wow! Eventually we got rid of the bedspread and had a plain cream one. The room just felt cold. Bland. Not terribly inviting.
For years I've had this idea -- either an Indian/Bali (that's the country, India) or a West Indies look and feel. "Tropical British Empire", I decided. I wanted a room that said "come in, relax.... spend some time in here."
My ideas were fuzzy, and I wasn't sure I could pull it off. Finally, we decided "This Weekend", and we went to Lowe's and looked at paint. I wanted clay-looking walls. Soft gold -- something you'd expect to find in the Indies. We picked one and went to look at curtains.
Well none of the curtains went well with the paint, so we found some curtains we liked and went back to the paint. Found a paint we liked with the curtains. Then Vicki saw the area rugs -- Persian style. One of them really spoke to us. But it didn't go with the paint or the curtains. So we took the rug to the curtains, picked out some other curtains we liked that complimented the rug, and went back to the paint to marry them.
Got the paint, curtains, rods, and rug. And a live palm on clearance for $4.64. Anyway, we WERE just going to paint that day and go from there. So what was going to be $45 worth of paint turned in to $450 worth of stuff to redecorate. But -- it was the way to do it, for sure.
We painted it in one day, and re-arranged the furniture. We were going to do the paint-glazing effects thing, but decided we liked the color as it was and didn't want to do the extra work. I bought a wall-shelf for some of my eastern statues, and a little bamboo "table-let" for my Kamakura Buddha. Printed some antique botanical prints of palms to replace the roses in their frames. Put the palm tree in, and got a mosquito netting "canopy" thingy because... well, the corner just needed something. Without it, the bedroom was "almost" there, but it was like missing the mark. The netting really changed the center of gravity and pulled it out of the fire.
We succeeded. It is warm and inviting. The only other thing I'd like (I never liked a television in the bedroom, for the record -- but it does come in handy sometimes) is to replace the television with an LCD wal-mount... maybe a 15" or 17". It doesn't have to be big... nor would I want it to be. I want it to be inconspicuous. TV's aren't pretty. The big one's down in the family room with the surround sound and all. However, a TV like that starts at about $500 -- and we have other things to spend $500 on right now.
So here it is. One "before" picture, and a few "after" pictures (of course, don't expect the links to be good a year after the posting, but it'll probably work until then....) the big bedroom makeover
Enjoy!
