BEDKNOBS & BAUBLES

We Finally Chose a Paint Color for Our Bedroom Accent Wall + Our Home’s Paint Palette

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It’s been over a year since we decided the old wall color had to go, and I’m happy to report that we finally made the change last week!

As a reminder, this is where we started. When we closed on our house, we tried to paint as much as we could in two weeks before our floors were scheduled to be refinished. Unfortunately, the expedited process didn’t allow for much time to mull over colors and I chose this way-too-bright blue from just the paint chip. I thought it would be more saturated than it was, plus I realized soon after that I like to wear bright colors not have them in my decor.

We kept this color far longer than we wanted — mostly due to paint fatigue after we painted nearly every wall and ceiling in the house! It was a year ago that I started getting serious about finding a new color. I tried a sample of Benjamin Moore’s “Raccoon Fur” and while I love how it looks in Instagram photos, I didn’t love it in this room. There’s a reddish undertone that read brown or purple depending on the light. Eventually I settled on Sherwin William’s “Homburg Gray,” a neutral gray with green and blue undertones.

Here’s how it looks with the other paint colors in our home:

I know that accent walls are controversial, but I really like it in this room to anchor the headboard. (That said, I’m incredibly tempted to paint the whole room this color because I love it that much.) I’ll be adding curtain rods and drapes yet this summer to visually extend the width of the window beyond that of the bed and really make it a focal point.

Then, it’ll be new lamps and — eventually — a new dresser. Updates to come!

Source List:

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Roundup: 12 Simple Wood Bedframes + The One We Purchased for Our Bedroom

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ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE | SIX | SEVEN | EIGHT | NINE | TEN | ELEVEN | TWELVE

As I mentioned in this post, our next interior focus is our bedroom. I had hoped to make more progress on this room since hitting publish on that post in August, but finding the right bedframe took a lot longer than anticipated. It was partly due to life getting in the way, but financially, we were replenishing our savings after the bathroom remodel.

Finding that “Goldilocks” bed wasn’t easy and we spent countless hours browsing sites and shopping in-person to find one we loved. We thought we found the one back in November, but if you click through, you’ll see that the leg support runs all the way under the bed. I loved it design-wise, but floors aren’t exactly level in an old house and I worried it would cause stress fractures even with shims. Back to the drawing board we went with our list of requirements:

  • Coordinate with our existing nightstands.
  • Sold wood preferred, but would consider high-quality veneer.
  • At least seven inches of clearance for under-bed storage.
  • Less than $2,500, unless it was beyond perfect then we’d go up in price.
  • Reviews that say it doesn’t creak.

We considered going with West Elm’s mid-century bed. It would have been an easy choice to match the nightstands from the same line. However, it was pretty lackluster in person. The wood grain on the veneer was barely visible, the back of the headboard was unfinished, and it just felt a little cheap. We then thought about the Article bed. We have a dining table and desk from the brand and love both. We were dissuaded by the reviews, though, when some indicated the bed creaked. Plus, the walnut finish — while beautiful — would have left us looking for new nightstands that coordinated with the finish. Then there’s this stunner from Rejuvenation that we both loved. It’s solid wood, which we eventually realized we preferred over the veneer options, but that price tag was a bit more than we wanted to spend and we wouldn’t have had an easy way to return the bed if we weren’t in love with it when it arrived.

Eventually, we selected this one from Thuma. Internet-only brands are such a gamble, but the reviews on Reddit were outstanding and vouch for the company’s customer service. I had actually eliminated Thuma from the search early last year. At that time, they only had an upholstered headboard that needed to be up against a solid wall for it to stay put — not something that would work in our bedroom which requires that the bed go against the windows. A solid wood headboard that integrates into the frame, however, was a game changer and the bed ticked off every requirement for us. The walnut finish is warmer in person, coming close to the color of the nightstands. It’s a beautiful bed and I love the look of the Japanese joinery that allows the bed to be assembled without the use of tools. We’ve only had it for two weeks now, so I’ll plan to report back in a few months with a full review!

Next up, repainting the accent wall. I think I’ve settled on a color and will be picking up a sample today!

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Home Update: Siding Work & We Removed A Door!

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Sources: Mailbox (similar) | Sconces | Storm Door | Welcome Mat

While a full bathroom remodel this year was incredibly exciting, the smaller improvements around the house are just as satisfying and deserve fanfare! Our latest update happened this Tuesday when we finally removed the inoperable door on our front porch.

As you may recall, this is what we were working with. For some background, our house was built in 1929 and would have originally had a porch to the right of the entry. Our neighbor has lived next door since he was a child and remembers that the space had double-hung windows all along the front of the house until the 1990s when George, a previous owner, decided to close it all up and reduce the window count to just two ugly block windows: one of them is plexiglass and the exterior framing on them doesn’t even match. The window situation is clearly an expensive problem for another day. (Thanks, George.) Our pressing annoyance was that door and since I don’t want a window in that spot, we decided to have it filled in now as we tend to have drafts leak through the gaps and insects making their way in for the winter.

A challenge that we ran into with hiring a siding company is that many don’t take on smaller jobs unless they did the work to begin with — even though we had piles of extra siding in our garage. Fortunately, our neighbor recalled that the siding was done by the person we bought the house from and he was gracious enough to dig through his records to find the company’s information for me. (This is precisely why I’ve started a home binder with things like contact information for tradespeople and paint colors that I can hand off to the next owner.)

The company we hired framed in the gap, insulated it, added the siding, and put up drywall on the interior side. They don’t do interior work, so I’ll be trying my hand at taping, mudding, and sanding this down the road. I don’t feel pressured to do a great job, since this will all be redone at some point when we invest in revamping this space. It’s a huge improvement over that janky door, though, and that posh screwdriver-through-hinge locking system.

Left: The “Before-Before” shortly after closing on the house, and mounting the mailbox. Right: Where we are today.

The team took down all of the siding on the right side and rehung it with some of the long pieces we had in the garage, so there isn’t an obvious patch. You’d never know the door was there!

More posts about the front porch:

Additionally, we had to address the exterior of our bathroom’s shower window. During our remodel, we reduced the size of the existing window (which you can see here). Our contractor ran into the aforementioned issue of siding companies turning down the work because we weren’t sure who had done it originally. Apparently the metal framing around the windows is impossible to do without the proper tools that our contractor would have to rent — and, I’ll be honest, since siding wasn’t their area of expertise, we decided it’d likely be cheaper to have an actual siding company do it eventually. Our contractor insulated the area below and put up the waterproof board at the bottom of our new window. We had him paint it black, which made it look like a regular window from far away and that’s what we lived with for the last five months.

And, here it is now! They really did such a wonderful job to make sure that the patching work was disguised. All in, the project cost $2,800, which I thought was reasonable.

If you’re wondering about that door up there, it’s from when the house was a two-flat and stairs led up to it. We had to install a permanent barrier in front for insurance reasons and found a gate that could be screwed in, but easily removed when we embark on that ordeal. The joys of an old house and correcting someone else’s choices, huh?

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Our Next Project: The Main Bedroom / What it looked like during the inspection, what it looks like now, and what our plans are.

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The next home project I’d like to tackle is our bedroom. It’s not a train wreck by any stretch of the imagination, but we haven’t done much with it over the past couple of years as we focused on other rooms. There are aspects of the space that I love and won’t be changing (and I’m still as smitten with that duvet cover as I was when I first bought it), but there are other aspects that I’m no longer fond of and items that were intended to be placeholders until we had money to invest in this space. Plus, I’m no longer thrilled with the jewel-tone accent wall I picked out when we closed five years go.

So, I thought I’d share photos of where the room has been over the years, along with what it looks like as of this morning with a few un-styled snapshots. You’ll also find my design punch list below!

First up, here’s what it looked like the day we did our inspection:

What a lovely, tranquil escape, right? Who wouldn’t want the focal point in their bedroom to be a hanging shoe rack?! 😉 Whenever I feel like we haven’t made enough progress in our home, I look back at some of these photos and I’m taken aback. It’s a testament to looking beyond someone else’s stuff and seeing potential in a space. We didn’t even need to do a lot to this room to make it look better right off the bat: we had the floors refinished in the house shortly after closing and we put a fresh coat of paint on everything. Painting the paneling (ahem, “vertical shiplap”) white brightened up the space immediately. We also had to take the tree down that you can see through the window above because it was dying, which opened the room up to natural light.

I knew I wanted some color in this space and chose a dark teal. It did turn out brighter on the wall than I had hoped for when we painted it five years ago, but it wasn’t too far off from what my style was at the time. Since then, my preference in paint colors is a lot more subdued — think colors pulled from nature in the Pacific Northwest; not the tropics. I’m going to keep an accent wall, though, however controversial that may be.

The photos above are the progress and after images of our floor refinishing. The stain hue is Early American, which offers a warm, classic finish that’s appropriate for the age of our home. (If you live in Madison and need your floors refinished, let me know. The person we used was fairly priced and did a beautiful job. Every tradesperson that has come over has commented on how great our floors look.)

One of the challenges in the space that I talked about here was that there was a doorway cut between two of the upstairs bedrooms. We worked with a local carpenter to create a shallow built-in that you’ll see below. The opposite side is drywall.

The built-in continues to give me a ridiculous amount of joy and it’s the perfect space to put the little trinkets I collect on vacation. Our carpenter did such a wonderful job matching the frame of the built-in to the trim of our doors. Unfortunately the vent had to go right there because it was cut into the floor when they opened up the wall, but it doesn’t bother me that much. I might swap out the grate for something decorative down the road, but it’s not that much of an eyesore in person.

So, that brings us to where we are now:

A peel-and-stick paint sample of Racoon Fur is on the wall. I don’t think it’s the color I want as it has purple undertones in some light.

Here’s what I’m planning to do:

  • Repaint the paint accent wall with a more subdued color that works with the existing duvet cover, but could also work with this blanket that I recently bought. I gravitate to blues and greens, so I expect any future bedding to be in those color families.
  • Buy a new bed with a wood headboard. Our current bed was a $200 Amazon find — a steal for a king-size bed. We bought it when we lived in the apartment because we needed something and knew that we didn’t want to invest in a bed until we had a house. It’s time to upgrade. The top is snagged from cat claws and it gets stained with hair products. I hate it.
  • Swap out the lamps. Those were around $15 at Target when we moved in and needed something. The scale is too small for a king bed.
  • Add curtains. We have roller shades that will stay to block the light. I’d like drapes to soften the room, but also to visually widen the window where the bed sits so the scale isn’t so wonky.
  • Style the bed with a selection of throw pillows, but not too many since they’re annoying to move every night.
  • I’d love to upgrade that Ikea dresser, but it’s fine for the time being.

Here are some of the paint swatches I’m considering:

And here’s one of my initial mood boards for the space:

Wish me luck! If I can get the painting done and choose a bed in the next few weeks, I think we’ll be in a good spot! And if I don’t get that far, rest assured that this before-and-after moment gives me some peace:

We’ve come a long way already.

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12 Neutral Home Decor Finds for a Summer Refresh

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ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE | SIX | SEVEN | EIGHT | NINE | TEN | ELEVEN | TWELVE

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Thanks for visiting! As a reminder, I may earn an affiliate commission if you buy an item through my links. This is at no cost to you. I appreciate your continued support!