I'm kicking off the "virtual tour" of our new home in North Carolina with the room that was finished last. Last night, as a matter of fact. Our bedroom is small-ish, and we have previously always tried to crammed a lot of stuff into it. For once, we managed to scale back, and I have to say, I like the results.
Making things work in a smaller space requires a little creativity. And a lot of prioritizing. We asked ourselves what items were most important to have in our bedroom and came up with: a bed (obviously), two nightstands, a dressing table, and a bookcase. That's pretty much it. And really, that's pretty much all the space would allow.
I have been obsessing over this soft, pale sort of blue-green color for a while. It seems perfect for a bedroom. It's pretty and soothing but also fun. I've been bookmarking versions of the color for months. Our new bedroom just happened to already be painted the color of my dreams. So that was a nice surprise.
There are a lot of colors in this room, which I love. My mom and grandmom were a little unsure it would all work together, and I guess technically it doesn't all match. There are pinks, greens, teals, browns, and even oranges in the bedding. The dressing table and one nightstand are an antiqued yellow. The other nightstand is green. I'll admit it's a mishmash, but I kind of love it. I think the browns in the sheets, wood floor, window shades, and wood furniture really help anchor it and allow the colors to work together.
This dressing table belonged to my great-grandmother. My mom used it for a while in the 60's and 70's, which is when it got it's coat of yellow paint (plus black and white daisy patterned drawer liners). To give it a different look we used an electric sander to distress the edges and added new knobs. It's the perfect spot for getting ready in the morning. Makeup and jewelry are organized neatly in the drawers, and hair tools are all easily accessible in an old teal-painted toolbox on the floor.
One thing that wouldn't fit in our new space was our old bed. It was a very pretty, very large sleigh bed that would have completely overwhelmed the room. We decided to use a simple frame bed instead, and fashioned a headboard out of a old door Keith found at the Habitat for Humanity Restore in Waco. Wonder of wonders, it was already painted just the right shade of blue-green, so all it needed was a little sandpaper, a little beeswax, and a few really long screws to hold it into the wall.
We switched out the original brass doorknob and replaced it with a pretty glass one. We finished it off by hanging one of my favorite prints directly over it. Again, you'll notice the mismatched end tables. The yellow one was my grandmother's painted yellow at the same time as the dressing table and distressed in the same way. The green one was something my mom pulled out of a dumpster years ago, and we just keep finding new uses for it.
In fact, that tends to be our philosophy about everything. Looking around our house the other day, I realized we only own one piece of furniture that we actually purchased: an old cedar trunk that we used as a coffee table in Waco. Everything else has been handed down, re-purposed and reused in many different way over the years. All we had to buy for our bedroom set-up was a little sand-paper, those really long screws we used to secure the door, and the door itself - which was a score at only $65.
