In the 5+ years I’ve been blogging, and the almost 5 years we’ve been steadily renovating our home (and sharing our progress on the blog) I’ve never gotten around to giving you a tour of our bedroom.
I’m honestly not sure why — after all, I’ve shared virtual tours of Nora’s bedroom, Simon’s bedroom, and 3 separate tours of the nursery (one for each new baby).
I guess I always felt like our room wasn’t really 100% finished, and I wanted to wait until it was finished to share the pictures. However, since we’ve been living in this house for 5 years already and I haven’t made any major changes to our room in those 5 years, I think it’s safe to say our room is as finished as it’s going to get right now 🙂
If I’m really honest, I love our room exactly how it is!
Although it’s actually pretty small (about 11′ x 13′) and we hardly have any decorations on the walls, it’s so bright and cheery. Plus, I really like how the bed is angled towards the door so it’s the first thing I see when I walk into our room.
All the furniture in our room is from garage sales, junk yards, and thrift stores (I spent less than $100 on everything!) and the red door behind the bed is actually from a dilapidated covered porch at our first house!
All my bedding is mix-and-match (from early on in our marriage).
I made the bed skirt out of a brown sheet and some lace from the fabric store; and I use another brown sheet as the “top blanket”.
The quilt was from Marshal’s and the duvet cover is Pottery Barn kids brand (I got it for $5 from a garage sale!) It’s actually for a full-size bed but works well for the look I’m going for.
The green dresser is for Dave and the white one is mine — both were $10 or less + a little painting on my part. We use our dressers to store socks, underwear, t-shirts, pj’s, and grubby clothes to work outside.
The rest of our clothes are in the closet — you can see how that is set up in this post.
This little chair and lamp combo is one of my favorite things… along with my ladder-turned-necklace holder!
Our bedroom is right off the living room, which is right off the office and kitchen. Some people might want a bit more privacy, but right now, I love that these rooms are only a few steps away from our bedroom.
A few before and after pictures – just for fun!
So there you have it… our “master bedroom” (even though it’s much smaller than Nora and Simon’s rooms and doesn’t have a bathroom connected with it).
Many people ask me why we didn’t do something to make our room bigger, add a fancy walk-in closet, or connect our room to the bathroom that’s right on the other side of our closet… and I guess we just didn’t think it was necessary.
We just sleep and get dressed in our room, so there’s no need for massive amounts of space — and clearly, we don’t need a walk-in closet as our current closet has plenty of extra room!
As for the bathroom issue, I’m perfectly content to walk 3 feet outside my bedroom door to go to the bathroom or take a shower 🙂
Ash says
Hi-
Your bedroom is beautiful and simplistic, I love it! You mention everything is furnished from garage sales and such, but what about the bed? Where did you get the frame, I aml ooking for one!!
Thanks!!
Andrea says
Thanks Ash. The bed (headboard/footboard) was from a junk yard almost 10 years ago — and I still LOOOOOOOVE it! It’s really heavy (iron maybe?) and is actually only a double bed frame — since they didn’t have queen sizes so many years ago. We just have them zip-tied to our queen metal bed frame 🙂
khaled says
I love it , thank you for sharing
Deborah says
It’s very, very pretty! I love it.
The before………WOW. You made it amazing.
Andrea says
Thanks Deborah!
MomofTwoPreciousGirls says
I know I’m in the minority, but I wish I did not have a bathroom in my bedroom! It’s so disruptive when you wake at different times. There is also a certain ick factor in my mind. Don’t really want the smelliest room in the house right next to where I sleep. When my husband cleans the shower (I know I’m lucky) he insists that bleach is the only way, but there are no windows that open in our bathroom or bedroom so the fumes are there for a long time. Mine has the DUMBEST set up, where the light switch is on the outside. So I actually shower in the near dark because I feel awful turning the light on in his face and the light that shines through the cracks bother him (he needs pitch black…brings electrical tape to every hotel room to cover the lights and puts a towel by the door to keep the light out!). If I ever have the opportunity to build my home I would want it either outside or have a walk in closet between!
sheila says
I love what you did! so cozy. that purple wall paper and mirror doors…EGADS!!
Andrea says
Thanks Sheila! Yes, we were happy to get rid of the purple, the wall paper, the mirrors, and everything else in that room 🙂
JJ says
So classy! It gives you the feeling of fresh and clean! Awesome job!!!
Rose says
LOVE IT!!!!!!! What a wonderful change from before to after….
We have the same bed, and it is the same one we have used for all 36 years of our marriage! However, ours is kept painted white, my DH doesn’t appreciate the shabby chic look, as much as I do.
I have a couple of questions though.
1) Is your bed original ( ours is about 1920’s) and does it have a spring frame rather than a box spring? Or have you adapted it in someway?
2)what color did you use for your walls? I love it.
3) Is it really a queen size bed, it looks more like a double?
Andrea says
Thanks Rose!
Our bed is definitely NOT original. It’s a brand new bed (we actually just replaced the mattresses from when we first got married last summer). We have a simple metal bed frame (queen), a box spring, and a pillowtop mattress. The headboard and footboard are “full size” but we just have those bolted to the queen bed frame.
Melissa says
Where did you get your laundry hamper? We have a super small room and I want to get a new laundry hamper and give our old one to my youngest daughter. I am glad to see someone else content with their “small room” as well.
Andrea says
our laundry hamper was from Hobby Lobby about 10 years ago 🙂
And yes, we’re OK with the smaller room. In fact, we originally thought about taking the absolute smallest room in the house (the nursery) so that 2 kids could share our room and we could all be on the main floor for longer, but that room was really “too small” to comfortably fit our queen bed. Plus, the closet is less than half the size of ours!
Heidi says
I love our bedroom furniture but I always feel like our nightstands take up so much room. Crazy question, but what do you do with an alarm clock, phones, etc?
Heidi says
Just saw your answer above! 🙂
MamaToo says
I thought maybe you had all that stuff in a basket under the bed, and then I thought–Duh! That’s what I need to do since I don’t have room for a bedside table.
Your room is very beautiful and restful. I have lived in this house for a year, and I still have hardly anything on the walls in any room. But it’s a small house, and the more I think about it, the more I really like the uncluttered feel of the bare walls, especially in my bedroom. It’s calming.
I would enjoy a post or two about renovation mistakes and the decorating mistakes you referred to from your first house, which I thought was actually really nice. We’ve lived in six houses in our nine years of marriage, and I still feel pretty clueless about decorating cohesively and in a sustainable, manageable, timeless style. So many decor blogs look like so much work and like you’d need a big house to hold all those pictures and end tables and knick-knacks. And I just don’t care for owls or horses and especially ANTLERS and deer heads, porcelain or otherwise. Your blog is the closest I’ve found to anything that looked doable.
Shannon says
I do love the simplicity of your room!
The first thing I noticed is no bedside tables! How do you get away with not needing them?! I need one for my phone (which is an alarm clock) along with another alarm clock/light, lip balm, lotion, ear plugs, tissues, etc. Do you not need to use anything once you get in bed? Or do you have some sort of hidden solution?
Andrea says
haha — good question!
We actually don’t need or use most of what you mentioned — but we do have a small table BEHIND our bed (in between the bed and the red door) where we keep the baby monitors.
I don’t use an alarm and Dave keeps his phone on the windowsill right by his side of the bed. Also, the little table with the lamp on it has a lighted digital clock that we can see at night if we push the little white “curtain” back. As far as tissues, lotion, lip balm, etc. that’s all just in the bathroom (which is 3 feet away from our bedroom) and I’m up all the time at night anyway, so I can easily grab something from the bathroom if needed.
At this point in our lives, we don’t sit in bed and read or watch TV. We mostly just fall into bed and sleep as many minutes and hours as we can until a child wakes us up! So I guess we just don’t need side tables!
Shannon says
Ahhh! A secret hidden table! I knew there had to at least be something!
Andrea says
haha, yes, “hidden”. that’s how I like things!
Heart and Haven says
I love how your entire house has a cohesive style, with every room looking like it belongs to the same house. I think your use of a few main colors to decorate with helps pull together this look. And I love how you furnish your home so frugally with inexpensive finds that are beautiful and “your style” and not needing to change out decor items every year.
You mentioned that you didn’t feel this room was 100% completed. What else would you want to change (even if it’s not on the short-term list of “to do”)?
Andrea says
Thanks! I made LOTS of decorating “mistakes” at our first house, so I had an idea of what I wanted to do with our farmhouse to make everything flow. The main thing is to keep the walls, the trim, and the floors REALLY neutral. Then I use lots of creams, whites, browns, and blacks to decorate — with a few punches of red, navy, or green depending on the room.
Also, to answer your questions about what isn’t finished in our room… I feel like we need more of something on the walls. However, I’m not sure what, or where (which is why I haven’t added anything yet!)
Chris says
I have a chair like that. Mine cost a lot at an antique store though. I got it re-covered.
Andrea says
well, it’s a cute chair no matter how much it was 🙂 Mine was very inexpensive and I didn’t even have to get it recovered since it was just beige. I did wash it well though 🙂
Deb says
I can’t believe you took down that border and the corner tv. It had such a nice waiting room feel. 😉 Just kidding. I like the lack of clutter.
Andrea says
haha — yes, the border and the TV went away 🙂
And yes, I’m a big stickler for “lack of clutter” in our bedroom!
Jane says
Very nice! And those pink walls – wow! Your window frames are very pretty! I am thinking we should add some molding around our windows. I don’t have curtains on them. I have very few curtains in my house, actually. It looks like you might have cordless blinds. I don’t want this to sound like criticism, but I notice the one is at an angle. We have all cordless blinds in our bedrooms. In the kids rooms, we have top down/bottom up cordless because we are in a raised ranch and I wanted to ensure privacy. So they can lower the shade and open it at the top if necessary. They are Levelor and we have had a number of problems with them over the years. Cords have broken and in one room, we have the problem with the cord not allowing us to pull it all the way down now. And when we raise it, it is angled. So I am curious if you have a problem with them too.
Andrea says
thanks Jane! The walls were actually BRIGHT purple sponge paint (with texture!) The carpet was a VERY faded bluish purple!
As for the blinds ours are also Levelor and we have them in every bedroom in our home. We really do love them (especially the cordless part).
It’s funny you should mentioned the crooked blind, because as I was editing the pictures, I thought “I should probably re-take that picture since people are going to point that out!” But I didn’t ever take the time to re-take it. If you notice, we also have 1 light bulb that is out too 🙂
We really haven’t had much trouble with our Levelor blinds (it’s been about 5 years now) in fact, the window that you mentioned has been the only window we have had any issues with. Sometimes the blinds don’t stay up tight (which is why it was crooked in the picture) but it hasn’t been a big deal for us. They still go up and down just fine.
One thing to mention, our blinds are not quite as “fancy” as yours because ours only go down from the top, they can’t be lowered to only cover the bottom half of the window. I would seriously contact the company if you have major issues. These blinds are too expensive to just deal with problems all the time!
Kim says
What a beautiful, calming bedroom Andrea! And that hardwood floor is stunning. My bedroom is also small and cozy and, like you, I don’t mind walking a few feet down the hall to the bathroom!
Andrea says
Thanks Kim — we LOVE the floors too! Everyone asks why we don’t have a rug in our room — and it’s mostly because I don’t want to cover the floors. Plus, our room is quite small and I feel like a rug would make it feel even smaller!