Bedroom updates

So in someways - many ways - the biggest bedroom update since moving in has obviously been the addition of a sliding glass door to my bedroom. I can't really express how much of a difference it has made in my space. Obviously just painting the walls white helped HUGELY - but the addition of all that extra light is just so good. 

As a reminder, here's where I started:

Dingy carpet, dingy walls, dingy ceiling, sad sun-protectant film peeling off the window... It was not a particularly nice or welcoming space. We pulled up the carpet in the room (we left the closets because we had so. much. painting to do that we didn't have time). We primed everything. And the walls were painted in the same Behr Whisper White in matte as the rest of the house. I bought a new bed and mattress, and here's where things stood for quite a while:

Except, you know, with a mattress and art on the walls. But you can see - painting the walls white and cleaning the film off the window just made everything better. (So did taking day-time pictures, let's not kid ourselves!)

Then came the sliding door which, like the bathroom window, was just a game changer. 

Look at that light streaming in! (Ignore the second lamp by the bed!) Look at the view out the door! 

I added curtains (y'all, Hearth and Hand by Magnolia for Target makes really good curtains AND really good curtain rods!) I found a cool arcing lamp on craigslist that makes a great 'bedside' lamp. I bought fancy sheets (cultiver linen top sheet and brooklinen fitted sheet and pillowcases). My mom brought me monstera cuttings (am I really a millennial if I don't have a monstera?!). I hung my art, including, just visible next to the door, a poster for an art exhibit with what is likely one of my favorite impressionist paintings of all time, "Echo," by Ellen Thesleff. I tucked a chair in beween the bed and the wall to serve as a bedside table. And it was all good.

But the question of a headboard persisted. My platform bed is just a frame. I couldn't find a headboard I liked (that wasn't exorbitantly priced). I enjoyed the painted arch trend, though I also wasn't sure I actually wanted a painted arch headboard. Finally I decided I would make the wall behind the bed a statement wall, with a dark blue-green painted to about plate-rail height. I narrowed it down to two colors, but I wasn't sure. Neither one seemed quite right. 

Then I was watching HGTV, as you do, and on that show where they are renovating a 1920s school to be a home for them and their like, 7 kids, they used limewash paint in the kitchen as an accent. I loved it - the depth of color, the movement, the way it looks like plaster. Then began the great hunt: who sells limewash paint in the US - and maybe more importantly, who sells it at a reasonable price?

 

I ended up ordering my paint from Portola Paints, in North Hollywood. Their showroom is actually just a few blocks from where my sister and her fiance live - and my parents happened to be in town, on a roadtrip, planning to come back through Santa Fe. I bought a gallon of their mineral primer, a gallon of a white, and a gallon of a deep blue-green called Darkside. The primer is incredibly thick - nearly like yogurt, honest. 

If the primer is like yogurt, the paint itself is more like painting with whole milk. It's pretty easy to paint with, honestly. We watched a few tutorials and then just went for it. We did learn that to get the best effect, we needed two coats to create a base, and then a third coat of 'x-strokes' to really get the most movement.

(The plain white wall you see here is also painted with limewash. It's not super visible, except in direct morning sun and even then only sort of, but it has given the wall this sort of velvety visual feel. I'm glad we did it, even if it's not obvious!)

The final piece (sort of - there's still no flooring in this room!) was sanding off the stain from a wood shelf my cousin's dad made my granmom. I did NOT like the existing stain; I loved the shelf. It took hours to get it sanded down to bare wood, but we did get it there! My mom and I both worked on the sanding part - I did probably 2 or more hours of sanding at 80 grit; she got the final corners and then the finishing sands. Because the shelf was made with scrap lumber, it did need to be stained. I used the Old American color - we wiped on a few coats. We also put a polycrylic in a matte finish on top. Then, using a french cleat, we hung it next to the bed for a nightstand/shelf. "They" say your nightstand should be bed height or lower, but this is raised a bit higher, to make room for Phin and his bed underneath. 

Here's what it looks like now:

This is where my bedroom stands at the moment. I have no major changes planned, except for whenever I do the floors. I do still need to paint the closet (it's still the dreaded yellow-cream all the non-purple and green walls were),  but that's pretty minor. There are some furniture swaps I want to do, but again - minor.  I do still occasionally wonder about a minimalist headboard, but for the moment am very, very content with my fancy wall. I am so, so pleased with how it turned out. It makes the whole room feel more finished! The wall plus the sliding door (and last summer's project - a little patio off of it) really make the room feel much more like a main bedroom.