The room as it appeared when we first saw the home.
Just when you thought I've pimped out every room in my house, there's more! It's not that the house is so extensive, it's just that it was built in 1910, when the fashion was to cut up living spaces into a zillion little rooms presumably for heating purposes. My bedroom, the second of two rooms on the third floor -- the other being my little gal's bedroom -- happens to be the perfect example of one of these small Edwardian-era rooms. Even though the rooms are a touch bigger on the second floor (also where the home's only bathroom is), we chose the third floor because we knew that unless we made it our bedroom, we'd never go up there an it would be wasted space. Also, eventually we're dreaming of moving my little bunny to the second floor and opening the whole thing up into a grand master suite (a la Rod and Nat's master of Marriage Under Construction.)
The "After"
When we took possession of our home, there were four major problems with this room; the floors, the wallpapered + painted walls, the cracking stucco ceiling and the dimensions -- it was long but narrow, making it hard to accommodate a master bed. As I've mentioned before, we did much of the work ourselves, qualifying the bedroom for, you guessed it, a Shoestring Makeover.
Here's how we addressed the four problems:
The Floors
They were painted with a zillion coats of institutional floor paint. Since everything was bound for white, we thought it would be nice to leave the floors wood. We sanded them with an industrial hand sander because the larger, faster floor sander would melt the paint, clogging and busting the sander in the process. The floors are the original maple plank flooring, which we finished with two coats of matte urethane.
The Walls
Despite being painted a zillion times, the seams of the umpteen layers of wallpaper beneath were still visible. I hand stripped one room of wallpaper and almost killed myself in the process, so an encore was out of the question. We did hire a painter for part of the job, who, despite being a total drunk (we'd come to check his progress and find that he's spent half of the paint budget on two cases of beer, which he had finished in the course of the day) apprenticed in Germany, and managed to feather plaster on either side of each seam, which when painted erased the seams completely. I try not to think about what lays beneath the paint on my bedroom walls...
The Ceiling
Needed to be replaced. Plaster would have been too expensive and eyeballing the dimensions there was not a right angle to be had, so drywall would have looked terrible. We decided on beadboard. It was a great choice, not just for the cost and the ease of installation, but for the look of it - charm galore! All it took was a vapor barrier and a nail gun. Later I labored on sealing the knots, which still bled through over time. But no matter, it still looks great.
Where to Put the Bed?
In the studio where we lived prior to the house we didn't have a headboard. Since our box spring couldn't make it up the narrow stairs, we could only salvage our queen-size mattress. This left us in need of a bed frame and after much deliberation we settled on the vintage iron frame. It was a bit of a splurge -- $1200 -- but it was worth it. The light, ethereal frame doesn't crowd the room and best of all, it could be placed in front of the window without blocking the light!
Everything else in the room we already had or had refurbished;
- TV -- old hand-me-down from my parents (clearly)
- Chair, Value Village, stripped and reupholstered - $100 (total)
- Nightstands and linen chest came with the husband; originally an ugly pine, now painted white. The lids remove for storage, and we keep our bed linens in the chest at the foot of the bed.
- The lamps are Lotte, a MidMod design still produced today, available in most contemporary design shop all over Canada. We got them on sale about 7 yrs ago, for $75 each.
Here's a
gallery of the gorgeous befores...
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I know, I know, there's nothing on the walls...Does it need anything? I'm not sure that it does... What do you think overall?
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