BEDKNOBS & BAUBLES

We’re Finally Tackling the Guest Room

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It’s amazing how quickly time slips by after you’ve purchased a house and how some of those “we’ll get to it eventually” projects are still on the to-do list years later. It’s not all that unexpected, of course. Houses are expensive and it takes time to save money again if you’re unwilling to shell out even more right away for renovations or furnishings. And then there’s the sage advice of urging you to live in your space before you make real changes. It gives you time to consider how the space is utilized and the opportunity to pinpoint the things that drive you crazy. And, if you’re like me, your style evolves along the way.

One of our spaces is the guest room — or, rather, the room on our second floor that makes sense to be a guest room but hasn’t actually had a bed in it since we’ve moved in seven years ago. The idea of spending money on a bed and mattress when we were in our mid-30s wasn’t something that we wanted to take on when we had other priorities: our own bedroom and a two bathroom renovations. Something recently switched for us and we’ve been more intent on furnishing that space. We’ve ordered a bed and a mattress, and I have plenty of products pinned to round out the room.

Before we get to all that, I wanted to share the guest room’s progress starting from our inspection through today.

Here’s where we started:

At some point, this house was a two-flat and the guest room had some kitchen cabinetry in it. We removed this within the first four hours of having the keys to the house and eventually put it up in the garage for added storage. On the left, you’ll see a doorway that was boarded up with an inoperable door and brackets. We also removed that right away, leaving us with an “open concept” space between the guest room and main bedroom that we ended up living with for a couple of years.

We had our floors refinished a couple of weeks after closing on the house. The timing worked out well as we had about six weeks left of our apartment lease while we were doing some cosmetic updates to the house, which included painting as much as we could manage. We were going to the house every day after work and painting until it got dark, then driving to the apartment. It was draining, and it’s what likely led me to go with this paint color initially:

I swear it looked grey in the swatches, but I didn’t take the time to put multiple samples on the wall to evaluate how it changed with the light. Instead of a pretty dove grey, it was lavender. I didn’t bother repainting right away; it was a space we weren’t using and we needed to solve this doorway situation before I was willing to spend a couple of hours repainting.

We eventually filled in the gap in the doorway with a shallow built-in on the main bedroom side (see it here). Our carpenter also created baseboards to match the original trim in order to fill in and repair the missing trim along the floor.

Also worth noting is that this area of the wall is now thin; it’s the depth of a piece of drywall and a layer of wood on the back of the built-in. There won’t be anything hung on the wall here because the nail will go right through the back of the built-in.

For paint, I decided to go in a completely different direction. Our main bedroom and office on the second floor are light and airy. Since the guest room doesn’t get a lot of light, I wanted to lean in on the coziness and go for something dark, yet classic. “Billiard Green” is one of the historic colors at Sherwin-Williams and I appreciate that it doesn’t skew too blue or yellow as many greens tend to do.

It was like that room was always meant to be green — just not in its previous iteration. It’s a beautiful color and I love how it looks on the original plaster walls.

(Oliver! I miss that little guy!)

After getting the walls squared away, we swapped out that ceiling-fan bracket for an actual light fixture and went with this one. It’s a $60 dupe of a more expensive West Elm fixture.

Now, the fun part! I don’t have a design fully fleshed out, but here’s what I’m thinking:

A metal bed is traditional and echoes the ribbed texture of the ceiling fixture. Plus, the bed is a a great price at $620 for a queen. Our style is very much traditional-meets-midcentury, so I’ll opt for a vintage-inspired nightstand like this one. We have a vintage dresser that I’ll keep, which has a similar wood tone. I haven’t settled on this lamp yet, but I do like the mix of wood and ceramic. I’m still exploring options for bedding, but I can’t wait to show you how it’s coming along!

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We Finally Upgraded Our Bedroom Lamps

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Purchasing new lamps for our bedroom was long overdue. As I get older, I’m pickier about the home items I buy. I want to invest in heirloom-quality pieces that I’ll love for decades to come — not just a quick replacement or cheap thrill. That takes a lot of time. It takes time to weed through hundreds of items online, read reviews, put together mood boards, and — perhaps most crucially — have a “cooling off” period to ensure that it’s really the right item.

I originally added these lamps to my Pinterest board at the beginning of my shopping journey, but continued to browse in case I fell in love with something else. And, yet, I came back to these. I’m a sucker for Schoolhouse’s designs and commitment to quality (cloth-covered cords seem to be rare these days), and I adore that the base is hand-blown glass crafted from vintage molds. It’s a perfect marriage of craftsmanship and design versatility. The hardest part was selecting the lampshade color, but I eventually selected the warmer hue of the natural burlap.

Schoolhouse Electric, Bond Lamp

To make sure I liked the lamps with the pieces I already owned, I put together a quick mockup (above). Fortunately, the IRL version turned out as great as I hoped based on my collage.

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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!

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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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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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