Potential

I have two upcoming projects that I want to consult with you, my reading public, about. The first and simpler one, concerns chairs.

We were lucky enough to find two used chairs for sale that looked like they were made for our bedroom. In fact, they match so well it's a little spooky. The first doesn't need any work whatsoever. D has been using it for a night table since we have yet to find ones we like:

The second one, which one kitty seems to have adopted as his new favorite chair, is beautiful, but has traditional dark wood legs that don't go with our furniture at all:

Project one is to fix that. (I know I know, we are possibly going to ruin a beautiful heirloom wing-back chair. But I promise it will look nice...) I understand the principles of painting wood though I haven't really tried it. We are going to sand the legs, prime them, and paint them with the blue paint we used in the closet. Then lightly sand again to get a more distressed look. At least that's the plan so far. We won't be getting to it until probably early June, which gives you plenty of time to provide your input. Leave us comments, please!

Project two is to build a craft area for me. Now that we're about to clear some space in the office, I have a free wall and plan to use it to store all of my random artsy things--mostly yarn and knitting needles but also residual products from past hobbies like beads, colored pencils, paints, charcoal, and stamp pads. (The wall in question is still a mess so no pictures yet.) This page has a lot of good suggestions but I want more! Since all of the furniture in the office is "antique stain" finished Ikea pine, I'd prefer to keep it that way (well, except for my steamer trunk of yarn--gotta keep the moths out). I'm leaning towards buying this piece, since it has so many cubbies:

I thought I might put the steamer trunk on top of a bench or media center that is flat on top but has drawers on the bottom, for additional storage. Again, ideas are welcome!

More of the Same

Still working on the bedroom and still really loving how it is turning out. The blues and greens are as soothing as I hoped they'd be and the Ikea Erfjord natural latex mattress is surprisingly comfortable. Here are many gratuitous pictures (and a reminder of it's previous state):

Let's see, what's worth a mention. Both the dressers are Craig's List finds (moving them, especially the massive white one, was not so fun). The rug is Ikea's Flokati (100% unspun wool). It feels absolutely heavenly in the morning on my bare feet. The reading lamp is Ikea too, as is the comforter (which is actually a long story for another post). The comforter cover is Pottery Barn's Sydney Palampore organic cotton duvet. The stars, which are in most major room in our house, are an old find from an Asian gift shop.

The closet is a pretty blue that I found for $5 at Home Depot. I think we'll be using it on the dark wood legs of a chair we might be picking up this week, to help it blend into the decor. I am absolutely thrilled that all of our clothes and shoes fit in one closet. That has never happened before.

We continue to make big strides on finishing this room off. The curtains I ordered should arrive later this week and we have plans for additional furniture and wall decor. Stay tuned!

And on a completely different note, I just have to document that I was actually able to grow violets. Not just keep the greenery alive but actually get flowers where there were none. This is so amazing for me, a complete black thumb. Mind you it's not like I did anything special. Just water it and keep it in the kitchen window:

Our Master Bedroom--Our Masterpiece

You've been very patient:

Ta-dah! What you're seeing is our freshly painted master bedroom. The walls are Sherwin Williams Duration satin-finish (as usual) in Willow Tree. Taking a suggestion from a magazine, we opted to tint the ceiling pale gray, to create a less glaring bright-white effect. It is done in Duration, matte-finish Fleur de Sel, the gray tone that SW recommended as a pair with Willow Tree. The trim is out-of-the-can white. Even though we know that doors are supposed to be satin or semi-gloss, we painted them in the matte Fleur de Sel too. Can you see the difference between the closet doors and the trim? Supposedly, Duration paints are washable whatever the finish...

Here is a picture of our spectacular bed. It definitely feels like one of Ikea's sturdier pieces, in solid birch.

In the end we decided to go with lighter woods to continue the idea we have of using lots of images and materials that look or feel sort of like being in a tranquil forest or a meadow or something like that (ugh, that makes us sound like such hippies!).

It was great timing because the bed that we bought a few months ago, also a Mandal, was honey pine with black drawers but before we built it (and while it was still within our 90-day return window), they replaced it with this birch and white version we liked so much better. The headboard is from the Brimnes line but is so new that it is not even on the website. Unlike the solid birch bed, it is made of particle board and cheap white plastic, but it matched the white of the drawers and was a perfect solution to our problem of finding something that could be flush to the wall and to the bed and not interfere with the baseboards. The cats like it too, because they can cross behind the bed in a perfect cat-sized tunnel. The shelf on top of the headboard is perfect for some reading lamps, too. I still want to put up a little hanging nightstand, so the tissues and clock can be within reach, but this is a great solution for everything else.

The next big issue to tackle is the mattress. We love our current one, which is a Simmons Beautyrest, but we are keeping it downstairs in the guest room. We could try to buy another one just like it, though even then there are about a dozen of varying firmness, so I'm not sure we could get an identical mattress (I can't find any useful details on the label). We've also heard good things about latex mattresses, and Ikea makes one for about $900, which isn't bad. If you've ever had an experience with one of them, please leave us a comment.

Our crowning glory is our Hunter ceiling fan. We got really lucky when we took down the old light fixture to find an electrical box that claimed to be rated to hold fans. The installation took a couple of hours but was a lot easier than either of us expected:

The next steps are to slowly acquire the rest of the furniture we need to complete the room. I am planning to buy a big comfy chair and pretty floor lamp to create a little sitting area across from the bed. We also need dressers in either white or light wood (birch, maple, bleached oak all seem to be useful keywords). Dressers are surprisingly expensive, so we are relying on Craigslist. None of the current Ikea models appeal to us, though one from the 1990s (called the Kurs) would be a perfect fit. We almost managed to snag one used but I guess another buyer got to it first. Don't you think it would have made a perfect match?

Sometimes I feel like this blog is turning into a giant Ikea ad....

Time for Round Two!

The holiday's are over and D is days away from finishing his thesis, so home improvement is back on the to-do list. This spring, we turn our attention to the upstairs. Now, those of you who have seen our home have noted that readers who have not had the pleasure may not even realize we have an upstairs to begin with. That was at least partially deliberate (very astute readers might have wondered about the extra bedroom I mentioned in this post). You see, we don't like to acknowledge that we have so much space. And since we have a Cape Cod-style house with a door to the stairs, we like to keep it closed and pretend it's a coat closet. But the time has come to recognize that behind the door are two more bedrooms and a full bath.

So we are going to finally begin work on the upstairs, specifically on the hallway and the future master bedroom. We're limited because we don't want to do any major painting until the windows are installed (probably early March) but there are small projects to keep us busy until then.

Here are some pictures and plans for what's going to keep us busy for the next month or two:

First, the hallway. The door on the left leads to the living room (here's an old picture for orientation of where the door is from the living room side)

You can see that thanks to some woodwork trim, there's a neat upper edge that divides the lower level from the upper level, which is very convenient when it comes to painting--they can be different colors and be painted at different times (which is good considering the upper half is going to take lots of fancy ladder configurations to get the ceiling and walls above the stairs). This month we're focusing on the lower half.

We're painting it Knitting Needle, the same color as the living room and painting all the trim white (it's all that pale yellow the previous owners seemed to love). We're also hanging new hooks from that band of wood above the light switches. We removed some pretty ugly ones but want to continue to use it for storage. We bought

3 sets of 3 Bjarnum hooks from Ikea that we think will look nice either in use or closed. Here they are in both positions:

Project two is the walk-in closet (not original to the house, obviously, since they didn't own so much junk in the 1950s):

Since the structure is all Closet Maid, I can make a lot of changes without having to totally start over. I'm planning to move the wire shelf down, since I am not 6'5'' like the previous people apparently were, and I might swap out the inefficient shoe cubby with something that will hold more. You can see the air-conditioning duct (the silver thing) that runs through the closet, so I can't mess with that much. Also since the closet is so big, I want to paint it. I'm leaning towards a silvery blue and hoping to find one of those really cheap cans of paint at Home Depot that was mixed and then returned. It's a closet, so I'm not that picky. Now's the time, since once it's full of clothes it will be impossible to empty out.

And finally the bedroom. You can see from the color that it was a little boy's room before. Though we're not going to do anything until the windows are installed, we're planning ahead and trying to decide how we want to decorate.

It may not be clear from the pictures but we have two dormer windows that bring a lot of light into the room. Each window also has a tiny shelf ( a little too narrow to sit on) and also "attic" doors on each side for storage. We like that the sloping ceilings end fairly high up, so the room is open and airy instead of claustrophobic, like a few Cape Cods we've seen.

Right now, we're planning to paint the walls a pale sage green and use blues and grays as the accent colors. We want our furniture to be shades of black and white stain and paint (D is a proponent of mismatched, eclective furniture though I tend to prefer buying in sets). We want a lot of storage and so have been looking everywhere for various storage beds (alternatively known as captain's beds). We've found a few good solutions by Pottery Barn, Gothic Cabinet Craft, and Blu Dot but Ikea beat them all out in price and customizability (that's not a word, but you know what I mean).The Ikea Mandal is really cheap and we can paint it whatever color we want. We bought one this weekend and I'm considering if it would be possible to stack two of them, for added storage space and height. Structurally, it does not seem impossible, though I can't find evidence of anyone else doing it...

The headboard (sold separately) is pretty cool and we might decide to buy it and install it somewhere else, but it doesn't quite do it for me as a headboard.

Other ideas for the bedroom: painting the ceiling a soft gray instead of bright white; installing a ceiling fan; installing wall lamps on each side of the bed; finding a headboard we like; turning one of the dormer cubbies into a little vanity area for me; finding plush, gorgeous rugs; finding the perfect floating nightstands that have a drawer (Most are just shelves. The drawers on the bed necessitate having a nightstand attached to the wall, so it doesn't block the drawers from opening).

And that's what's going on with us. As always, suggestions are always welcome. We really have no idea what we're doing, we just pretend like we do.