Moving From Warm to Cool

Snippets of our master bedroom have been posted over the past few weeks, but I think it’s time to reveal the whole room—all 10x12 feet of it.

When we first painted our house, I wanted to work with our original bedding, which was chocolate brown.  I liked the idea of a warm and insulated bedroom—it seemed more intimate for some reason.  So I boldly forged ahead and painted it this color.

We didn’t mind it for awhile.  In fact, I never really disliked the orange, but I began to feel boxed in by color scheme.  There were days when I felt like our room was something out of the Brady Bunch.  But since we hadn’t even lived in our house for a year, I felt guilty about repainting, and instead, I made up my mind to live with it.

This is where I virtually hug generous relatives.  Matt’s Aunt Kathy gave us a sweet Pottery Bard gift card for Christmas.  We decided to use the gift card to purchase something substantial—something that would really make a difference in a room.  In a way, we were looking for a focal point to build off of.  And that is when we discovered that West Elm, Pottery Barn’s sister store, was having a sale on their bedding.  It certainly didn’t hurt that my cousin works at West Elm and was able to get us an additional 40% discount off the sale price!  So we threw caution to the wind and ordered the winter pine duvet in sage blue—pattern and color!

I was sort of hopeful that the duvet would match the orange color on our walls—you know, in that eclectic sort of way that feels purposefully thrown together.  Alas, it was not a match made in heaven.

That’s when I remembered my roots—my mother is the queen of redecorating and repainting—and I decided that if a gallon of paint could transform our bedroom for around $20, then I was not going to let a timeline stop me.  I debated over paint colors for awhile, vacillating between a very light blue (Martha Stewart's Driftwood Gray) and the neutral tan (Valspar’s Oat Bran) we have throughout the rest of our house.  After painting a swatch of the blue on the walls, I felt like it would be too much blue everywhere—it felt a little cold, too—so I went with the tan, since I knew that there would be plenty of other opportunities to bring in soft shades of color in our accessories.

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A few days later, Matt helped me prep the room by taking down the curtain rods and hauling furniture out to the living room.  Since we don’t have tons of furniture anyway, it wasn’t an overly taxing process.  (If our room was bigger, I probably would have just moved everything to the middle and covered it with a drop cloth.)  To break up the job, I edged the room on Friday night after we moved all the furniture out, and I spent Saturday rolling paint.  Because it’s not a large room, I even had time to paint our dressers Martha Stewart’s Winter Day.  Check out the matching hardware I spray painted here.

When we pieced the room back together, I was sorely disappointed to realize that the full/queen size duvet we had ordered barely covered the entire bed (note to self: try out bed covers before redesigning entire room around them).  Thankfully, my faithful husband was there to calm me down (me—panic?).  When I was able to think straight, I realized that while I love the pattern of our duvet, it is pretty busy.  That’s when I ran back to the guest bedroom and grabbed the white shabby chic comforter off the bed and threw it onto ours.  It made a huge difference, as it completely covered the bed and tied all of the tan, blue/grey, and white together.  Here’s what it looks like all together.

We are loving the calm and relaxed vibe of our bedroom; I wake up feeling soothed by the cool colors.  It really is crazy that changing the colors of a room can completely change the way it makes you feel.  I’m sure that some of you are thinking, yeah, but what about the guest bedroom?  It’s true that our green guest bedroom isn’t looking quite so pulled together these days, but my thought is that a home’s master bedroom should be a place where you feel completely at ease.  Since we spend far more time in the master bedroom than the guest bedroom, I’m okay with making it feel plush at the expense of another room.  And who knows—maybe I’ll spy a great deal on bedding for the guest room down the road.

For those of you who love a breakdown, here was our total cost:

• West Elm duvet set—way discounted and covered by the gift card from Aunt Kathy


• Target shabby chic white bedding & throw pillow—stolen from guest room at no extra cost


• Lamps from HomeGoods—$22 each for a total of $44


• Uno lamp shades from Wal-Mart—$15 each for a total of $30


• Quart of paint for the dressers—$12


• Spray paint for the dresser hardware—just under $4


• Gallon of paint for the walls—$22


• Total cost for room makeover—$112 (yay for birthday money!)

Not bad for a weekend’s work!  The lamps were the most expensive part of the whole makeover, but since I repurposed the lamps that used to live in our bedroom and gave them a new home in our living room, I suppose you could say that we would have spent about that much on lamps for the living room at some point.

Keep in mind that the room isn’t completely finished.  We’re working on a DIY headboard at this very moment, plus we’d really like to add some sort of wall art to add a little character to our neutral walls.  We’ll be sure to post it when we finally get around to it.  By the way, does anyone know of a great resource for finding wall art?

What have you guys been up to?  Has anyone else tackled a weekend makeover recently?  Feel free to link up to any photos you have!