We have worked on a lot of rooms in this house and, with each project, it feels more and more like “us” and less like someone else’s house.  One glaring exception to that is our master bedroom.  Pretty much everything about it needs to be addressed.

2007 – Right after we moved in.

There is a lot we could easily do to make the room so much nicer and I honestly don’t know why we’ve waited so long.  It’s just one of those things that I think we got used to and it just started to blend into the background – although given the carpet, that’s hard to believe, I know.  We knew it was icky and we’ve talked about how easy it would be to update, but I guess it has just never been a priority.

Anyway, last week, we finally made some changes – we re-arranged the furniture!  I’d like to take credit for the idea to shuffle everything around, but really, we did it for safety.  We had 6 trees cut down in the back yard (pictures coming as soon as everything isn’t under a foot of snow – it was a crazy weekend in the Midwest!) and, before they left, one of the tree guys pointed out a very large, very rotten hackberry tree growing in the ravine and leaning slightly toward the house.

The deadly hackberry tree.

He labeled it a very dangerous tree and said he hoped no one slept in that corner of our house … which, of course, is where our bed was.  We’d never paid much attention to the tree before, but it is in really bad shape (the rot is on the other side).  So, until we can get someone out to take it down, we rearranged our bedroom furniture to be on the safe side.  Not the most normal reason for rearranging furniture, I know.

We originally said the new furniture arrangement would just be temporary until the tree could be taken down, but the change has turned out to be really good.  The room makes so much more sense this way!

Like a good blogger, I neglected to take any pictures before we started moving things around, but, to give you an idea of the layout, here’s what it looked like right after we painted (in 2008).

2008 – After wallpaper removal & fresh paint.

Since then, we’ve had a few more furniture pieces make their way into the bedroom as we bought new for elsewhere in the house – a green couch, a way too small night stand, a console table, etc.  Basically, it had become a dumping ground for furniture that was one step away from leaving our house.

So, when we decided to re-arrange, our goals were to get the bed out of the area that used to be the sleeping porch and to keep it so we could still see the TV from bed. (Gotta have priorities.)  Bonus points if the TV could also be watched from the couch.  (Again, priorities.)  After thinking through a few different options, we wound up moving the bed, mismatched night stands, and a tall dresser with the TV into the first room and made more of a sitting room area out of the old sleeping porch space.

Looking into the bedroom from the doorway.

With this arrangement, we had to block a window with the bed.  We worried about that initially, but the bed just won’t fit anywhere in the room without blocking either a window or the thermostat … and we picked window.  It’s only been a week and this already feels normal to me.  I think if we hang some curtains on that window, it will feel even less strange.  The TV sits on top of the tall dresser opposite the bed.

Dresser, TV, and toys with wheels. (All totally normal for the master bedroom, right?)

The old sleeping porch area then became more of a sitting room, with the couch, coffee table, low dresser, and elliptical.  It feels so fancy to talk about our bedroom having a sitting area.  Ha!

Looking into the sleeping porch / sitting room.

Although we (clearly) have a ways to go to fix up the bedroom, the furniture placement makes a whole lot more sense now.  It actually feels like a bedroom with attached sitting room.  It feels like we had a plan and thought about where the furniture should go instead of just putting stuff where there was room (which was what had happened before).

Looking into the bedroom from the sitting room area.

We love how the bed is so much closer to the master bathroom.  And how the bed and night stand is what you see when you peek into the room while coming up the stairs (rather than looking at a portion of our furniture graveyard).

And, bonus, with the TV where it is, it can actually be seen and sort of watched from the couch.  It needs to be swiveled a little, but it is totally do-able, especially if it’s just on in the background while we play on laptops or iPads.

Obviously, there are still a bunch of things we would ideally change.  We’d actually like to try the TV on a lower piece of furniture – maybe on the lower dresser or a TV stand.  And we need to find an alternate home for all of Haley’s “toys with wheels”.  There’s also this odd corner in the “sitting room” area where we need to install some wall outlets for cable/CAt5 … and then we obviously need to furnish it a little better – maybe the tall dresser could move here if we figure out something different for the TV.

This corner desperately needs some cable management … and different furniture!

And then, of course, there’s carpet, paint, light fixtures, bedding, curtains, night stands that match, pictures for the walls, etc.  But, one thing at a time – and we think the re-arranging the furniture was a good “one thing” to start with.  It has definitely made us think about how to make this a more functional space.

What do you think?  Ever put something somewhere when you moved in and never given another thought to whether that was how it really should be?  Or are we the only ones who still have green floral carpet and mismatched hand-me-down bedroom furniture seven years later?  Please say no.

We stopped at the carpet store again this weekend to look for more carpet samples that might be closer to what we were thinking for our master bedroom. We spent a lot more time looking through all of the different samples this time and I’m completely amazed by the number of frieze samples they had. I guess that must be the new big thing in carpet. The frieze samples the sales lady sent home with us last weekend were really rough feeling and rather messy looking … we weren’t fans. But, when we started to look today, we noticed that there’s really a wide variety of options, some of which are nothing like the samples we brought home last week.

We came home with three more samples to look at this week … all of which are considered frieze. Here’s a picture of a couple of them:

The one on the right is a really close color match to the walls, which I thought would be a good thing until I got it home and now I think it’s all going to blend way too much and make everything that doesn’t match exactly (like the blinds and comforter) look yellow-y. The one on the left is kind of a mix between the wall color and the shade color, so it picks up some of both. Right now, I think that might be a better option, but I’m still kind of confused. There are just so many options! The third sample we brought home was more for the texture since the sample itself is kind of a blue-y green color. Texture-wise, I think any of them would be ok … and they’re all available in colors that would probably work. It just seems like this is one case where life would be so much easier if there weren’t so many choices!

The shades we ordered about a week and a half ago for the master bedroom and bathroom came last week. I was really impressed considering that the website said to expect a 2-3 week wait, but they shipped within 2 days! We started installing them last week and finished up this morning. I’m really excited to have them up – the bedroom has been noticeably colder since we took the old shades down for painting.

For the master bedroom, we ordered the standard room darkening Levelor cellular shades in a color called “Sand”. The color isn’t quite as good of a match to the wall color as I thought it would be, but it’s a pretty close match to the comforter so it still looks like we knew what we were doing when we ordered them. :) Here are some pictures:

In the master bathroom, we chose a light filtering cellular shade in the same “Sand” color. Even though they’re the same color, they don’t really look like a match. The room darkening ones are so much more opaque, so the color looks really solid. On the light filtering one, it’s a lot more variegated. It’s fine for our application since they’re in two different rooms, but they’re definitely not a close enough match to put them in a space where you’ll see both and expect them to look the same. Here’s a photo of the new bathroom blind:

We opted for an inside mount to avoid covering up the trim, but I think if we had it to do again, we might have gone with an outside mount instead. Since our windows aren’t perfectly square, mounting the shades on the inside really brings out any imperfections. We still have one that we need to spend some time adjusting because it hangs a little crooked. We also had one window that was added after the house was built (when the sleeping porch was enclosed in the 50’s) and it’s trimmed out a little differently than the others in the room. We didn’t really pay attention to it when we were measuring for the shades, but when we went to hang the shade for that window this morning, we realized that there was no clear place to put the mounting brackets on the inside of the window without damaging the trim. So, we just mounted it on the outside instead. It looks fine except that it’s a little narrower than we would have ordered had we been intending to do an outside mount. Eventually, we’ll probably put up some drapery panels, and by the time those go up, I’m sure it won’t be noticeable. If we had it to do again, though, planning on an outside mount would have been a much easier approach!