In a previous post, we talked about Pursuing Your Dreams And Passions, creating the life you want. Today we’ll take you on a journey to create a colorful bedroom revamp.
In this week’s post, I want to introduce you to my sister JoJo and her creative journey this year to design her dream bedroom. Helping her to stick to her New Year’s resolutions for a tidy home. Not only helping her to better her day-to-day but allowing her to create her vision for a peaceful space.
If you are thinking about giving your house a colorful bedroom revamp and taking that next step to customize your life – definitely go for it! It’s totally worth it! This isn’t even my bedroom and I believe that.
Take it away, JoJo!
– E.
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New Year, New Me… Yeah, yeah, yeah.
After three years of COVID, working in my living room, spending 24/7 in my house with my husband, and going through a kitchen/bath/living room remodel I was down to only one room in my house that I hated. My bedroom. It was a disaster, the generic “stuff” room. Item doesn’t have a home? Throw it in the bedroom! You hate that room anyway, just close the door. Bedrooms are for sleeping in anyways, right? It’s not like it needs to be presentable to others. I was wrong. So very wrong. Some people just have to learn the hard way I guess… more on that at the end.
My New Year’s resolution this year was to be more organized.
When you grow up in a hoarder house, it’s challenging to make this a reality. You know deep down inside you’re messy but somehow just can’t find the motivation to put things away. Probably because no one ever taught you how, and now in your 30’s it’s like learning a new language. Also, strange. Because I am such an organized individual in most other aspects of my life.
Anyhow, as 2022 was winding down and I was thinking about goals for the New Year, I declared that 2023 was going to be my year of organization! My husband, while extremely intrigued and cautiously optimistic about this new year, new me declaration, was skeptical, to say the least. “How are you going to do that?” he said. “Well, I’m going to have the bedroom painted and that’s going to change our life!” Duh.
50 Shades of Greige
I hated that book but the sentiment is accurate for my bedroom “before”. The walls (which hadn’t been painted in over 30 years) were greige. Not grey. Not beige. Some weird in the middle neutral color that should go with everything but somehow goes with nothing.
On top of that, my furniture is all slightly different shades of white. I don’t like a matchy-matchy room, so I have furniture from several different places – as most people do. Of course, this means one item has a more cool undertone, and another skews more warm, and another is just straight up white white.
Combine it all together with greige walls, and ivory trim, and a neutral duvet cover and what do you have? A whole lot of boring. Also, a whole lot of lack of motivation to keep things tidy.
I don’t know about you but I am motivated by pretty things. (They say it’s the Libra thing, but I don’t know if that’s true.) What I do know is if it looks pretty, I’ll keep it nice. If I am uninspired, well, the chances aren’t high. That was the current state of our bedroom as 2022 was coming to a close. And the inspiration for this colorful bedroom revamp was born.
Hell had frozen over in there and even the devil himself wasn’t interested in that room. First things first, I could not allow myself to go into 2023 with a messy room. Luckily I had set that goal several months in advance. As any good procrastinator says, “I work best under pressure”. Naturally, I waited to conquer the cleaning until December 30th and 31st.
At approximately 10:56 PM…I know you…
-Elisha
I finished my bedroom tidying project with an hour to spare and slid into 2023 with a sense of relief (yes I was capable of bringing order to this room!)… and a plan.
The Plan
What was my genius idea to keep my room clean in 2023? To have it painted!
Let Operation Colorful Bedroom Revamp commence!
-Elisha
I can say from our past remodel, that I know this works for me. It is not the cheapest option, but if you have the budget I highly recommend it.
I had a serious mental block/hatred for this room. After we had a new kitchen and bathroom installed, I can say both are kept much cleaner than in the past.
I knew I wanted to do something bold, yet classic. We have a San Francisco Victorian with some lovely vintage details. I didn’t need new furniture, so it was really about how could I tie the room and what we already have all together?
2023 Resolutions
A few months back I did some design work for my office and we used some fun wallpaper in a few conference rooms. I thought it might be fun to have one statement wall in my updated room. Off to Scrollville (i.e. Pinterest) I went! For my office design, I used Spoonflower wallpaper, and our painter said it was good quality. I started there, looking for designs and colors that felt like us and not overwhelming. Boy is it easy for wallpaper to be overwhelming! Pattern too big, pattern too small, pattern too… trippy. So many choices.
One of my other 2023 resolutions was to be better at making quick decisions. I am a perfectionist and this often leads to indecision.
Or throwing tantrums on the bed and crying because the pattern isn’t working out right…just me?
-Elisha
I’ve also noticed that even if I spend hours or days researching something, frequently I end up picking one of the first five items I saw. So I kept that in mind as well. If you like it a lot, then commit (with of course input from your sister and your besties – let’s not be totally crazy).
One of the wallpapers I saw within the first few pages of my search was The Scent of Wild Grasses. I kept coming back to this one and it set the tone for the room. All the ladies agreed it was their favorite and then the designing for this colorful bedroom revamp began to take off.
Pinterest is so great for home design inspo. I scrolled ideas while searching Yelp for the perfect painter. I found Sope at Three Fingers Painting and the rest is history. (If you’re in the Bay Area I can’t say enough good things about her, she has meticulous attention to detail!) Sope came out and assessed the room, and I explained my wallpaper concept and told her I was considering doing a dark color on the walls and asked her opinion.
She was so encouraging and had this great point: It’s only paint. If you hate it, we can change the color. Not to sound like a hippie-dippy San Franciscan but I’d say it’s worth the investment to work with someone that you vibe with and who feels like they get your design style and process. This will make the whole project so much easier.
It’s always good to brainstorm with a professional!
– Sister advice
Color Commitment
Sope said we could wait for the wallpaper to arrive before deciding on our paint color but the new me was ready to commit (also the impatient me realized it would take longer to finish this project if we did that, and my husband was already complaining about the timeline…so…chop, chop).
After a trip to the paint store, five minutes of holding a paint chip up to my computer screen to compare it with the wallpaper, a discussion with the girls, Sope’s suggestion, and an argument with my husband over shades of Navy, I was ready to embrace my new quick decision philosophy. I know that sounds like a lot of steps, but in reality, it was all decided within a few hours. (The old me would have taken an extra week…or two to decide.) Once I commit, I am ALL in. Go big or go home. I was already home, so naturally I had to go big.
One of the great vintage details in our room is the picture rail and curved ceiling. The picture rail creates a lovely natural divider, and I selected Benjamin Moore’s Hale Navy for the walls and White Dove for the ceiling and trim.
Luckily my impatient yet decisive decision paid off, and when the wallpaper finally arrived (after all the walls were already painted Hale Navy) it couldn’t have been a better color match. Whew.
This is my sales face for my husband, it says, “Isn’t it great? Don’t you just love it? I know you were on the fence but you’ve got to admit it’s cool right? Right? RIGHT?!?“
Being Your Own Interior Designer – Pick a Direction and Lean Into It
What about the rest of the room you ask? The most important two steps are:
- Decide on the vibe you want the room to have. Cozy? Glam? Boho? This really helped when picking textiles. For example curtains; did I want velvet curtains or linen? My friend pointed out velvet is more glam, linen is more cozy. I wanted my room to feel warm and inviting, but also have some California cool to it. Often your space is a mix of styles, but really think about the feeling you want your room to have and let it guide you.
- Decide on your accent colors, then it’s easy to make decisions on accessories. I went with Navy, a lighter Sea Blue, and Clay for a color pop. My wallpaper has tons of color in it, so it’s easy to work in other pops of color here and there. This is a colorful bedroom revamp after all. I mean obvi.
Making It All Come Together
Now to accessorize (the real fun part)! Etsy is a magical place that allows you to customize, often without paying outrageous custom prices. I found so many neat things by letting my imagination run wild and not being afraid to request custom items and go deep down different rabbit holes. Some were dead ends, and some led to other ideas where I eventually landed.
We have extremely tall windows, so I knew that I would need custom curtains if I wanted them to end up anywhere near the floor. I found these beautiful linen navy curtains that had no problem being made to a custom length. They shipped from overseas and arrived in less than two weeks!
For our bed, I wanted a cozy duvet cover that had that warm lived-in feeling, kind of like your favorite pair of jeans. I fell in love with this Organic Muslin Gauze Duvet Cover. Oksana was super helpful, and again – made my duvet in a custom size and shipped it from Ukraine in rapid time.
I had this blank wall that’s never been properly utilized. It’s a good size space but what could I really put there? We have plaster walls and I am terrified of causing cracks, which seems to happen to me any time I add a nail in the wall. This space is at the end of our bed and has a vent, so a piece of furniture or mounted shelves wasn’t right.
I love plants and so I started down the wall-mounted plant rabbit hole. Nothing was jumping out at me until I saw a kind of shelf with baskets on it (it was hideous but gave me the idea to search for hanging baskets). I found these cute baskets and ordered three in various sizes (pay attention to the measurements, I ordered sizes B, C, and D but if I was to do it again I’d probably size up one to make finding plants a little easier). I hung them from these hooks.
Next on to hat storage. I knew I wanted a wall-mounted hat rack, I have two hats I’m always moving around to try and keep them from getting crushed. A lot of what I was seeing out there (both on and off Etsy) was just utilitarian and not worthy of being featured. I stumbled upon this cute leather hat hanger on Etsy and reached out to see if they could make me one that holds two hats instead of three. They said not a problem and that solved that, I love how it turned out.
I don’t know about you, but depending on the weather sometimes I like to have an extra throw blanket on my bed and sometimes it’s just too much. I wanted to keep the blanket close by and use it as an accent. Plus, it’s my husband’s special blanket that we got on a trip to Mexico and I knew he would be happy to see it as a feature of the room. I found this charming towel rod, which again, they cut to a custom length for me. (I swear in old houses, everything is a custom length. The bane of my existence. Almost nothing standard will fit anywhere in this house.)
I haven’t had a full-length mirror in over two years, and my wall space was rapidly disappearing. There are doors and/or windows on every wall. I had one little corner that might fit a mirror, but only if it could go at an angle and didn’t stick out too much because it’s between doors. I started by looking on my go-to furniture sites, WestElm, CB2, Crate and Barrel, etc.. On WestElm Kids I came across this mirror that on one side is a mirror and on the other side it’s a pinboard. I didn’t care about the pinboard feature at all, but I thought, if you can flip it, you can angle it.
The corner where I placed it is of uneven proportions, one side of the wall is 4″ wider than the other. I knew I had to be okay with it not being perfectly centered, which wouldn’t have been possible even if the walls were the same because of the mount. Luckily, the uneven walls and dark paint worked in my favor, it doesn’t really appear to be off-center.
We’re all about making things work regardless of whether it’s perfect. It’s our new look on life, since we’ve let go of perfectionism.
-Elisha
I added a few plants and ta-da my new room was complete!
California Cozy Whimsical Wonderland (If I Had to Name It)
Here is the after! I had this beauty, Guadalupe, that I found at the Indian Market when I visited Perú, framed. This looks great hanging from the picture rail above my bed! It has all the right colors that are in the room.
I’m interested in swapping out the hardware on my armoire to make it a little less deco and a little more mid-century modern. Another deep dive down the Etsy rabbit hole is in order because naturally 30” handles that include a center mount are nowhere to be found on the internet. Sigh.
I Was Wrong But Then I Was Right
While this was my New Year’s resolution, I am pleased to report that our room has stayed clean (as predicted! Knowing yourself is the first step.) I have also made the bed every. single. day. since it was completed a few months ago.
The best part of my whole colorful bedroom revamp? Turns out I sleep better! Apparently being surrounded by clutter messes with your REM situation. My husband is happy too, and now fully onboard with my vision. He, he, he.
So far I’m sticking with my 2023 organization resolution!
I hope you liked this colorful bedroom revamp! Let us know in the comments what was your favorite part and if you think you will do a colorful bedroom revamp of your own.
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