New Bedroom

It's been a long time coming...

We've always wanted to have our bedroom in the front room of the 2F. It takes up the whole width of the house (actually 2 open connecting rooms), looking out onto Ashland and Dale. But, in the house's previous life as a rooming house, it had been a greasy kitchen area, and it was in really rough shape.

Our vision for the room actually came from a tea tin I got Patrick when we were first dating. The contrasting blues were feminine yet not too girly. A few years back, we got an enormous deal on some hardwood flooring, so put that in, but then with the baby and life changes in general, things kind of ground to a halt.

Over the summer, we finally finished stripping the woodwork (it had gotten it partially stripped with a heat gun years before, but only to a certain height, giving it that "bark stripped by deer in a winter forest" look). Once we finished the woodwork, there were wall repairs to make, and then painting and hours of Patrick's detailed stenciling. Then, because we did all of that exactly backwards, there were many hours spent cleaning up the floors...

The work was hard, but we had the details in our mind to work toward. We picked up the wardrobes last year at an Ikea sale, and they look great against one wall, approximating the "custom wardrobe" look we aspired to for a lot less. The curtain panels were also picked up on sale last year at West Elm, though I sewed the tiebacks last night during Mad Men. One of the lights we got at Creative Lighting with a Groupon, the other at Ikea.

While shopping at the Restoration Hardware closing sale last week, we were saddened by the sense of "You want character? Purchase it here for instant access in one fell swoop" nature, totally lacking in creativity. Here, while Patrick painted the walls, I spent hours gluing pages of my very first set of "The Chronicles of Narnia" to butcher paper, then cutting it to fit above the picture rails and whitewashing it. Then, once I scraped down the accumulated grime on the floor vent, it was just to pretty in all its layers of patina to paint over. These are the items that really demonstrate the room's sense of place.

It's a beautiful room, in a future we are building together.

(I'll add some "lived in" photos soon...)