Evolution Of A Bedroom: a house log

Blerg. I either have food poisoning or a stomach bug today. But thanks for all the stool enjoy this morning, folks (wait, that sounds kinda gross). And as for this afternoon, while I attempt to avoid breathing on anyone else in this house (who are all thankfully unscathed so far), I thought it might be lively to create a little “timeline” of how each room in our house has evolved, since it is certainly never an overnight transformation around here. And given our copious bedroom updates, we thought it was a fine place to start. So without further ado, here is how the room has evolved over the last twenty months since we moved in. It is still not done, but it has certainly come a long way – and it is truly lively to look back on some of those “middle” stages and wonder what the heck we were thinking. Haha. Thank goodness for trial and error!

This rundown is a fairly strong reminder that small changes (along with a few big ones) can truly breathe new life into a room as you learn what you enjoy and how you’d like to live. We have in fact come to a place where we wholeheartedly believe that over-time tweaks are half the lively (I’d likely want to move every year if I could only do a room once and then had to live in that frozen-in-time-result without changing a thing). So here is the quite first shot of our bedroom that we shared the day we moved in. Fairly much a blank canvas.

First we simply plopped our furniture down on the floor and did not even have a bed for the first three weeks or so. Getting up every morning from a ground-height mattress = not our fondest memory.

Then we got Ed the Bed since we were overwhelmingly excited to have such a giant room to work with (our old bedroom was around 10 x 11′ and this room is 16 x 16′ – so we thought something big and frame-y would look excellent in our cavernous room).

Then we got this duvet on clearance from West Elm, but John only let me get it under the stipulation that we would ebay it if we found something we liked more down the line. Hindsight = 20/20. We never should have settled and certainly should have held out for something we both enjoyed. Oh well, live and learn. Right now it is neatly folded in our playroom simply in case we decide to use it/the fabric for some other space (curtains for Clara’s big girl room, etc). Otherwise it’ll certainly hit ebay someday.

Next came our big ol’ snowball of a chandelier, which is still one of our go-to things to stare up at before bed or squint up at in the early morning. Here it is hanging oddly low thanks to that top bar of Ed the Bed (it looks crazier in this pic than it did in person, but it still was not quite right).

We struggled with Ed for a while, tweaking him to remove those top posts since they were simply too encroach-y with the chandelier. Oh and we got a pleasant big jute rug to cozy up the splintery old wood floor. Here is that phase.

Then we found two Alaskan botanical prints at a yard sale (we honeymooned in Alaska, so we thought they were sweet for our bedroom) and hung them on either side of the bed with Ramsey in the middle.

Things fairly much stagnated there for a while until Ramsey was broken during a book shoot (he jumped off the wall in the kitchen when no one was even in there) and we chose to hang the botanicals inside the bed posts instead. And then we found our new rug at a local outlet, so we pulled the old rug out (with plans to use it under our dining table or in our sunroom eventually – or craigslist it if we do not like it in either space down the line). Our new especially-discounted outlet rug certainly breathed life back into this stuck/stagnating room. So grateful. Sometimes it takes changes like this to jump-start things again once you’ve hit a wall.

Then in a flurry of trying new things, we gave three distinct prints (picked up for $2.99 from Ikea a while back) above the bed along with distinct pillows from around the house…

… only to decide we preferred the botanicals and another pillow combination (along with some lamps that we in fact picked up for the bedroom instead of simply using leftovers from our first house’s living room).

Then we at last put on our big kid pants and chose to simply give the bed a try on a wall that we previously thought would be way too challenging (thanks to an off-centered window on one side and a nook on the other side). At first it looked crazytown…

But after we re-hung some art/rearranged some furniture that we already had, we ended up here.

And then we gave Ed a little haircut.

And then we made an upholstered headboard to cozy things up a little more.

Next we at last painted the walls a darker color (Rockport Gray by Ben Moore) which certainly helped the headboard and all the thick white trim pop (John hoped to do it for months and he at last wore me down). Boy was right. We enjoy it so much more in this moodier sleepier color.

It is especially noticeable how much the new color accents the chunky white trim around the sink nook. Such a difference!

Of course we still have plans to:

• refinish the floors
• possibly paint the ceiling a light light blue color
• furnish the whole bare wall across from the bed
• eventually turn a window into a door that leads out onto the deck
• someday vault the ceiling so it is sweetly peaked (how cozy would that be?)

… so we will have to keep you posted. But it is fairly interesting to look back at all of these phases of evolution, sort of like a time capsule of where we were, where we were trying to go, and where we are now.

In fact when we look back in our archives, every single room in our first house evolved the same way – moving things around, using what we had, altering things to work, getting new things along the way, and hitting up plenty of outlets and thrift stores along with affordable retailers like Ikea and Target to keep things wallet friendly. Did we make mistakes? Sure! Did we learn as we went. Absolutely! If we could rewind would we skip all of those wrong moves? Who would not! But it is fairly cool that even with those mistakes, you can come fairly far (and learn a ton about yourself and what ya enjoy) by simply giving things a shot and letting a room evolve over time. Sometimes over a long a$$ time. Haha. But the journey is part of the lively, right? Our first house took us 4.5 years to figure out, so perhaps we are getting a compact bit faster in this one?

Although some other rooms are fully untouched, so perhaps not. Haha.

It is funny how some things stayed, like:

• Ed the bed (although he did get that trim)
• our free hand-me-down dresser from John’s parents
• our leaning mirror (which John got me as a wedding present back in 2007)
• our $50 Ikea chandelier

Meanwhile, other stuff came in from other rooms, like:

• the Hobby Lobby mirror that used to hang in the living room
• that small white cabinet from the dining room

And other items went out, like:

• the old rug
• the old side tables (both of which we will reuse or craigslist for loot to put back into other tweaks)

Thankfully even things like those old too-small yard sale side tables were simply $11, and we will likely get to use those in Clara’s big girl room (and can consistently resell them for at least that much) so it is a good lesson that simply because you buy things, you do not have to be married to them. Undoing something like a paint color or an upholstery fabric can take a day of work, but it is hardly irreversible. And it simply might be the key to making it through a not-sure-where-we are-going phase and onto another enjoy-it-so-much-more phase. Heck, even if over time you realize that a furnishing or accessory is not the best choice for a room, there are certainly other rooms where they can go to live (like our blue stool story from this morning). We enjoy keeping things flexible and taking a fully reversible approach to making our house a home. It is simply so much less intimidating and final than having some unspoken cannot-make-mistakes rule (even if you wait for years between decisions, there is no guarantee that you will enjoy each choice- sometimes you simply have to live and learn).

It is lively to see all of these bedroom evolution pics on one page, right? So stay tuned as we slowly work our way through all of our other rooms (likely on and off over the next few months – or years if we fall off) simply to see where they’ve been and where they are going. The goal would be to keep these posts updated as we go, and to link to them from our House Tour page – or another page called Room Evolutions – so anyone who wants to see details on a specific room could click on that room and see these rundowns with a bunch of links to all the projects during those distinct phases (a number of readers have in fact requested that we group room updates that way).

Have you ever snapped photos of a room over time as it evolved? Did it take more than one paint color to get it right? Were you surprised to see what stayed and what went? Were you shocked at how much of a difference some free changes like rearranging the floor plan or tweaking furniture (like cutting Ed’s posts) can make? Did little homemade touches (like an upholstered headboard) end up making all the difference? I think our Hands-on headboard along with our giant pineapple-based lamps are our go-to things in the room these days.

What is your go-to thing in your bedroom?

Psst- This month we are making a trip out to visit John’s grandma in Huntington, WV, so if anyone has an excellent house that they’d like us to crash (a la these) in either Huntington or Charleston WV, we’d enjoy to check out your digs and hopefully stop by (simply send your submission pics to [email protected]). Woot!