Sage – Author at Plaster & Disaster

Last week I shared lots of less-than-beautiful “before” pictures of my home, so this week my goal is to convince you that there are good things to come. Enter: our bedroom makeover! In our apartment, our bedroom was one of the last spaces I tackled because guests never saw it. That was such a mistake — every night when we went to bed, Sam would read and I would just stare at the walls and think about how much work I wanted to do in the room. When I finally got around to making it over, it made such a world of difference.

So this time around, our bedroom was one of the first rooms we worked on, about a month into owning the home.

Here’s the bedroom our first night in the house. Don’t judge, it was a stressful time.

And here it is for the first month we were in the house:

Yeah, this is pretty sad looking. This is me being vulnerable and honest with you guys, I do not like to show my home looking like this. The walls were a nondescript cream color, with wood window casings, doors, crown molding, and very beat up base boards. There were a number of holes in the walls, plus unsanded spackle from where the seller had done about 50% of the work to patch holes. And since we knew we wanted to paint, we didn’t want to spend time putting up mirrors, artwork, curtains, etc in the meantime — so our bedroom was in a state of bland limbo.

Though the room is relatively small and we have fairly low ceilings, we decided to go with a dark color — we’ve always liked to think of our bedroom as a little cave-like, a cozy place where we can retreat and sleep and relax. I picked out Black Pepper by Benjamin Moore, and had it color-matched to Olympic ONE paint. We also bought some tinted primer because we thought it would allow us to use only one coat of paint (paint is more expensive than primer), but when we opened it up it wasn’t as dark as I’d hoped (I think partially because it wasn’t freshly mixed since it took us a month to get around to the project after buying the paint) so we just decided to skip the primer. We ended up only needing one coat anyway, the coverage was so rich.

First I spent a day painting the window casings and doors white. It seems like this shouldn’t take so long, but it really does. I had to do one coat of primer and then two coats of white paint to cover up the original wood underneath. Before anyone panics about painting wood, it was not in good condition, and it looks much better painted. Plus it’s our house, and I want white trim. So there. ☺

I also spent time fixing and patching some holes in the walls — our seller damaged the walls in a few places by hanging artwork and such, so I needed to patch that up. In one place there were metal pieces that I couldn’t remove protruding from giant holes, so I use my dremel to trim them down and then I spackled the holes.

: The challenge

: Nothing a dremel can’t handle

: And then spackle to fill the hole (this is actually wood filler because I was out of spackle, but spackle would be better)

The next day, we were ready to paint. Sam rolled the walls, while I painted around the floor, ceiling, and windows with an angled brush. The detailed work takes so so so long, much longer than rolling. That’s the curse of having better fine motor skills than my lovely husband, I suppose. I painted both the crown molding and the baseboards the same colors as the walls, because I thought it would help make the walls seem a little taller if they weren’t sandwiched between trim on the top and bottom (the ceilings are only 7.5 feet).

I knew we had a winning combination when I saw how the dark walls looked with the white trim:

Once the paint dried, I tackled some decorating — adding art, mirrors, and curtains, plus moving in the new side table I bought at a yard sale the previous weekend to serve as a bedside table. I’m so pleased with it — it’s the same height as the other bedside table, and they relate so much better to each other because they’re both wood.

Without further ado, here’s where we are now:

Moody and dark bedroom -- Plaster & Disaster

The lamps, throw pillows, and curtains are all DIY projects from our apartment-dwelling days (one of the lamps was Sam’s when we started dating, the other I found in a thrift store years later and discovered it was an exact match, then I painted them both white; the curtains I made out of a shower curtain from Target).

The mirror I got off of craigslist and painted white years ago, and the jewelry bust is made of foamcore — one of my first DIY projects ever. The jewelry armoire was my first furniture painting project — it used to be brown laminate. The inside is lined with patterned green contact paper.

DIY sunburst mirror -- Plaster & Disaster

The sunburst mirror is a DIY, made out of paint stirrers (inspired by Centsational Girl); in the vase are faux craspedia (billy balls) that I made out of felt roving; the full-length mirror was left behind by the seller on the back of the closet door, and I want to make a wooden frame for it to add some heft.

It’s a huge change, right?!? We’re pretty darn pleased. We love the paint — it’s a dark gray, but it reads deep blue in some lights. It feels so much more sophisticated now, but also calm and cozy. I don’t know if I would have thought a room could be both “sophisticated” and “cave-like,” but this room has convinced me. And I love the relatively simple decor.

Here are a few of my favorite details:

My dresser and jewelry armoire, where I finally got my jewelry set up. I find that I never wear jewelry unless I have it out and easily accessible.

In our apartment I had an earring holder that I made out of an old bulletin board, but I wanted to keep the wall next to the mirror uncluttered so I grabbed an earring tree at Michael’s. The wooden box that says “Sage” is something my mom came across and gave to me. Currently it’s hiding my deoderant…now you know all my secrets. Also, in all our moving, our two dressers definitely got a bit beat up. They’re family pieces, and I really want to do some simple restoration work on them. Naomi has had good luck with Howard restor-a-finish products, so maybe I’ll give that a try and we can report back.

Another detail I like is the hook I added next to Sam’s side of the bed, where he can hang his robe. It’s tucked away from view when you enter the room, but within easy reach for those frigid and dark New England mornings when getting out of bed is torture.

And here’s a close up of the art behind the bed:

This is what we have engraved in our wedding rings: “We finish each other’s” in Sam’s, and “sandwiches” in mine. It’s a quote from Arrested Development (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Frozen stole this from Arrested Development, and it’s not the only thing they lifted), which is one of our favorite shows.

The writers of Frozen claim to have never seen the show and instead say: “Sandwiches are a very big part of our writing experience. […] We were always eating bagels when I was writing these lyrics.” Sure…

To make the prints, I grabbed two frames from Michael’s in a two-for-one sale, and also got some posterboard that I cut to the size of each frame. Then I printed out the text on some nice paper I had left over from wedding projects, and used double-sided tape to stick the printouts in the middle of each piece of poster board. (Someday soon I will make actual mats for them using the mat-cutting tools I recently bought, but this will do for now.) Then I slipped them into the frames and hung them up. Simple as that. I’m a big fan — they’re sweet because they have meaning for us, but not overly romantic which just isn’t our style and also would feel kind of out of place in this bedroom which seems to have a more masculine aesthetic with the dark colors and wood furniture.

So that’s it! It really has come a long way. Just a quick reminder of the before and after:

With so much more work to do on the house, it’s nice to go to bed every night in a space that we love and that feels complete. Lesson learned, bedroom makeover should always be near the top of the to-do list. Plus I love the fact that we totally made over the room while relying 90% on things we already owned, including so many DIY pieces — the only new things were the yard sale side table ($10), art behind the bed ($12 for frames), the earring tree ($12), and of course the paint.

(FEATURED at AKA Design! – and sharing at Think and Make Thursdays and Remodelaholic)

Now that we’ve piqued your interest with some pretty lamp makeovers, we’re going to hit you with some not-so-lovely pictures for the next few days: our house “before” photos. But we promise to show you not just the good but the bad and the ugly on this blog, and we hope you’ll trust us that there are more pretty things on the way.

Sam and I just bought our house in September 2014, and it’s very much a work in progress. We’ve made some big strides, but before I start sharing all the amazing and inspirational things we’ve done that I’m sure will be going viral on pinterest in no time, I thought it was only fair to show you what we’re working with.

Here’s a taste to whet your appetite:

But first, a bit about how we found ourselves writing an offer on this home. We casually looked at houses online for about a year before we were ready to really start looking, and then once we started seriously looking we found the house we wanted to buy in 1.5 weeks. It certainly needed some work, but it was mostly aesthetic (rather than structural) and we knew there was so much potential if we were willing to put the time in. Plus I loved the idea of something that needed a little TLC, given my passion for DIY and home improvement. Me in a “turnkey” home = miserable. Also, this is all in the context of the Boston real estate market, where your options are: 1) tiny, 2) far from everything, 3) condo, 4) fixer upper, or 5) be a millionaire. Since #5 wasn’t an option, #1 and #2 weren’t super appealing, and #3 would involve interacting with others, the fixer upper route seemed like our best bet. Still, we hoped we could find something that didn’t need too much work since we’re not nearly as intrepid as Naomi and Brad (you’ll learn more about their house on Friday).

Our agent is the one who first suggested we see the house we ended up buying, and we actually said we didn’t want to because the photos just weren’t flattering. Often photos make a house look better than it really is, so I figured if the photos weren’t great then the house must be worse. Thank goodness he took us there anyway! What I learned is that this house doesn’t photograph easily, and I’m still learning how to photograph it better for blog purposes.

So without further ado, here’s the house as we saw it at our open house! (This is all the seller’s furniture, not ours.) Fair warning, many of these photos are from the listing sheet, and are grainy and fuzzy. It really is a seller’s market.

It’s on a bit of a hill, so the view from the front sidewalk has you looking upward pretty significantly. This is what we saw when our agent drove us past it for the first time:

Being a Harvard grad, I immediately identify with any building that has ivy growing all over it. Plus I’ve heard that it’s so good for the siding. (This is a “sink or swim” introduction to my heavy reliance on sarcasm in my writing.)

The primary entrance to the house is actually from around the back, though, since the driveway accesses from the next street over. So our agent drove us around to the back:

Back of house before -- Plaster & Disaster

This driveway can fit six or more cars at a time. We truly are in the suburbs.

It’s hard to tell from these photos that the backyard has tall privacy fencing on three sides, and then the fourth side is completely open to the neighbors. It’s like living in a diorama.

In any case, entering the back door we found ourselves in the sun room. It’s a more recent addition to the house, a bit of a bonus room. In addition to the two sets of windows and the window into the house (kitchen) that you see here, there’s another set on the back wall.

Then the sun room enters into the kitchen, which really does not photograph well. Here are the photos from the listing sheet:

On the wall behind where you’d stand to take this photo is a large set of windows, which actually lets a lot more light into the kitchen than these photos would lead you to believe. And the blue counters are a lot better in person…but they’re still bright blue counters. With the addition of the lilac walls, I can see why other buyers might have been turned off. All I saw was potential to have loads of fun painting and tiling.

Straight through from the kitchen is the living room:

Pantone claims that “marsala” is the color of the year, but I just don’t believe them. We actually painted the living room the day that we closed on the house…the seller was still slowly moving her stuff out the whole day (that’s a story for another time), and we busted out the paint rollers and got to work. By nightfall, the living room was light gray.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. In the second living room photo above, you can see the front door through the living room doorway. The front hall is pretty small and wouldn’t make a good entry point, though, so using the back door into the sunroom does make a lot of sense.

Here’s the view down the hall standing in front of the front door:

The first door from the hallway is a small bedroom/office:

And then the next doorway leads to the master bedroom. It’s not huge, but it’s decently-sized and does have a closet.

Conveniently located next to the bedroom is the only bathroom:

Then up the stairs we go to the two rooms on the second floor:

Both have some really creative paint choices.

In case you can’t see it clearly, the thin strips covering the seams in the blue paneling are actually coated in pink flowery contact paper.

Let me just reassure you that you are NOT in fact trapped inside a watermelon. Don’t panic.

But you ARE trapped inside a room that must have at one point been used by a teenage girl (I think the seller’s granddaughter). As evidenced by this on the walls:

Two levels down is the thing that really sold us on the house, though: the basement. Imagine us huddling in the corner with our realtor and telling him we had to have the house. I know it doesn’t look like much, but it’s huge and partially finished and visions of a home gym, workshop, and beautiful laundry room were forming in our heads.