The Big Reveal
Well, well, well… Pinky’s bedroom makeover is finally completed! And it only took 4 months. We are so excited that it is finally finished and Pinky has been livin’ it up in her new space. You may remember the before picture that I posted way back at the end of March…
It was certainly a good blank canvas to start with. Enough of that old space though. It’s time for the big reveal.
It was a lot of fun to try and figure out how to make this room work for us. We had a few features that made decorating the room a pain in the behind. First, the 8 x 12 room was the smallest bedroom in the house. Not too small, (I know some people have much smaller rooms) but smaller than her previous bedroom at our old house, so trying to fit all of the same furniture in there was a bit of a stretch. Ok, it wasn’t even possible. We decided that it was obviously important that she at least had a bed and a dresser for clothes, but anything else would have to be flexible and if it didn’t work out, we would have to find it another place in the house to live, i.e. the playroom/music room.
Secondly, we had to take into account that there was one wall completely devoted to the radiant heat source which is enclosed by a chunky baseboard cover. That made putting any substantial piece of furniture there complicated. Also, a lot of stuff in the room is DIYed or updated from its original look, so most of our time went into working on that.
Take, for example, the dresser. It was a hand me down that we re-painted and added new hardware to. We think it fits perfectly into the space without overwhelming the small room. (You can see it here in our old house.)
The small box on top of the dresser is actually just an extra that we had from Ikea. I decided to cover it in girly fabric and add a simple bow. Now, Pinky has a place to stash all of her little paper projects when it’s time to clean up.
If you’ve been following along for awhile, you will remember the “art work” that we made to put in some of our old frames. It’s pretty nice to be able to repurpose stuff you already own. Especially when it turns out so pretty!
There is also the cutey antiqued owl switch plate which we scored from Anthropologie and the pretty Brocade waste receptacle from the Container Store. Although they are only small details, they do make the room more cheery.
As far as furniture goes, there really was only enough room to have a bed and a dresser, but we wanted the space to offer a little more. This mirror ended up being perfect for a little dress up area. Pinky can now pick and choose her outfits from under bed storage of her dress up clothes and then check out her new look whenever she wants. She loves to brush her hair and put on “makeup” in front of there as well.
And there it is… the bed from, well, you know where. This thing gave us more headaches than anything else in the room. The bed originally comes in a light blue shade, but we wanted white, so of course, we decided it would be SMART to paint it.
We tried brush painting, but that proved to be too time consuming, so we scratched that and attempted spray painting. Well, that was a disaster. Whatever we did, we just could not avoid little drip spots (is that the technical term?) and it really looked horrible. So, we proceeded to sand everything down and then repaint by hand again. Honestly, the room would have been finished a lot sooner if it weren’t for that stinkin’ bed. Thank goodness it is done!
I absolutely love our hardwood floors, but for some reason I just don’t like to step onto the cold floor in the morning when I get out of bed. I felt Pinky shouldn’t have too either, so when I saw this rug on sale for $2.99, I grabbed it and didn’t think twice. It’s also serves as a great place for her to play, read books, and have tea parties. Or for a dog to sleep on.
Since we couldn’t fit in a proper bookshelf (it’s currently hanging out at the top of our landing,) we thought that this white basket from Land of Nod would work as a nice landing spot for books. It’s also good for transporting books back and forth between the shelf and the hallway. Pinky loves to read and be read too, so it was important to have some sort of book wrangling system in her space.
As I mentioned before, Pinky enjoys her new, made-over space. Because of the setup, she has ample floor space to play and dance in. Chris and I also liked that the room can be easily updated if Pinky’s love for pink diminishes by adding different colored accessories, since almost everything works with gray!
So what do you think? Does the bedroom makeover make the grade?
