Bedroom before and after.

This past week has been spent decorating the bedroom, little by little each day, until we finally finished yesterday.   To be perfectly honest I HATED our bedroom before we decided to decorate; it was completely bare: bare walls, bare windows, bare shelves.  Nails and screws jutted from the walls, boggling the mind to how much stuff the previous owners must’ve had hung on the walls.   And it became a room to hide things out of the way, from the vacuum cleaner to an old TV stand we haven’t used in more than six months.  I think it’s easy to end up overlooking or putting off bedrooms: you don’t tend to entertain guests there, and its quite easy to simply shut the door and forget about the clutter.

Now, with the room completely finished, it’s a relaxing place to end the day with a book in bed.  I used two warm greys, with the darker of the two serving as an accent wall.  The black and white prints on the shelves are my own, set in 20 x 27″ frameless frames (and these prints are now available in the Print Shop).  Aside from the potted plant, the rest of the stuff on the shelves was pulled in from other rooms, including a vase of sea shells Moo and I collected on Brighton beach.

The space above the bed is a wallpapered square bordered with wood moulding.  I saw this idea for framed wallpaper on Apartment Therapy and fell in love with it.  Yet, even though I LOVE how it looks, I would not do it again as it’s a TON of work.  This bit of the room took the longest, taking hours to measure out a perfectly level box drawn on the wall, getting the wood bits cut and painted, getting the wallpaper cut not only to size, but also so the pattern matched, and getting it all up on the wall neat and straight and perfect.   The wood needed to be painted again after being secured to the wall with a combination of small nails and wood glue.  And I will NEVER hang wallpaper again.

But what can I say? I love the result!  And with all the clutter gone, the grubbies on the wall painted over, the holes from all the nails in the wall filled in and sanded down, and the end result of a week’s worth of hard work in place just as I imagined it our bedroom has gone from bleak and cluttered to beautiful and relaxing.