Master Bedroom Wall Decor, Part 1

We're finally completely unpacked and are now to the hanging-things-on-walls phase of moving in. It is by far Allen's least favorite part of moving but he tries to be a good sport about it. I've been working this week on the master bedroom. The layout of this room is VERY different than our last room so I'm only about half way done. We have a nice fireplace in our bedroom that I'm trying to figure out how to decorate around.

I don't think there are very many rules in decorating any more (yay!) but I do think one of the most important aspects of a well decorated space is to have wall decor scaled to the space you are decorating. Big walls need BIG pieces or a variety of small pieces clustered together to give the effect of a larger piece. It gets tricky because bigger pieces tend to be more expensive and most of us decorate on a budget! But you can decorate to scale inexpensively.

I hung these plates over the bed and paid a$3-4 per plate, except for the rectangular plate which was about $10. Big space but grouping a bunch of things together to fill up the space.

Wider view of the space:Up close:This is the HUGE, vaulted wall by the dresser. I left the surrounding space to give you an idea of how massive this space is. Close up:For this wall I gathered up some antique windows and painted them the same color. I got the scrolly F vinyl off of etsy and applied it straight to the window glass. These windows were quite cheap. My mom gave me the windows on either side but she said she paid $18 each for them. The scrolly F window was $20 and the 6 paned window was snagged from our house in CT. The vinyl was $30 so all total I paid $50 for this grouping. Definitely a cheap, fun way to fill up a gigantic space. I even had a couple of extra windows that I did not include in the grouping. The frames on my dresser are my kids' newborn pictures that I've had up since Carter was born. I plan to always have them somewhere in my bedroom.

Of course, if we owned this house this room would have a totally different look. The walls would be painted (an awesome color from Martha Stewart's delicious new line of paint at Home Depot) and all the frames would be painted black or white. When trying to decide what to do for this wall I tried to do something that I could repaint or repurpose in the future in a different home.

So there's the first peek of our MBR. I have a couple more projects in the works (including my first reupholstering attempt) but I am loving how it is coming together!

(Here's the first post I did about the bedroom redo and the before look of our newly painted furniture: From Drab to Fab(ish)

From Drab to Fab(ish)

Good News: Everything for our Master Bedroom redo is DONE. Did it take me long enough?

Bad News: You don't get to see it pulled together

Good News: We are moving!

Bad News: We are moving!

Ok, so after searching for a house for months we finally found a great house in our ward AND our school district!! It has been stressing me out so I'm so glad that part is finally done. Except that means that I now have to do the actual move. The home is three years old but has never been lived in (!!!) so it is new, and clean and beautiful.

So just when I had all the stuff for our bedroom done, we are moving so I am not hanging anything on the walls. I do want to share some pictures of the bedroom furniture. Decorating is a looooong process for me. I'm picky, I'm on a budget and I'm indecisive. Two years ago I decided to start looking for new bedding since that pretty much sets the tone for a room. I had an idea in mind but could not find what I wanted. I even priced out having custom bedding made to get exactly what I wanted but it was pretty cost prohibitive. This past fall I decided to make do with some bedding that I found and liked a lot but did not LOVE. Our bedroom set was one of the first big purchases we made after we got married. We got the nicest set we could afford at the time and I liked for about 7 years. My style evolved some and I decided the cottage-y look isn't really my style but we had a NICE bedroom set that I couldn't justify replacing.

Here is a look at the furniture before:

The white furniture just melts into the white walls and it looked so blah.

I knew that if I was going to go out and purchase a new bedroom set I would choose a black set. I just love black furniture so I started doing tons of research about refinishing the furniture. Allen was really skeptical at first but I knew we could make it look great if we were careful. We picked a weekend where we had nothing else going on and turned our garage into a paint shop. We lined the floor with cardboard and draped plastic over everything in the garage. I did a ton of research on paint and found a Behr paint at Home Depot that had the primer mixed in with the paint and had a smooth but hard finish. We purchased a paint sprayer and went to town. The paint sprayer is what made this project fast and our finish nearly perfect. We sprayed the first coat and then let it dry for a couple of days. There were a few drips that had to be sanded out before we applied the second coat. We let the second coat dry for about a week before we moved it back into our room and then we let it dry inside for a few more days before we put the drawers back in. Having our room torn up for a couple of weeks was not ideal but the end result was worth it!

In the meantime, I kept searching for bedding and found my DREAM bedding at Anthropologie. It was a bit of a splurge but after searching for bedding for 2 years I decided it was worth it. It took a couple of months to get all the pieces since a couple things were out of stock but I impatiently waited to get it all.

So here it is:

{B&W duvet and Euro shams from Anthropologie; black ruffle pillow and white gathered pillow from Kohl's; teal floral pillow made by moi; sheets from BB&B}

One of the dressers:To minimize the cottage style I decided to replace all the wood knobs with glass ones. Again, I did a lot of shopping around for these and finally purchased these off of ebay for $1.25 each (compared to $6 each at local stores). Just pretend you can't see the lovely fingerprints up there that I am clearly too lazy to clean and rephotograph here.

I didn't make any of the bedding except for the floral pillow. I saw a tutorial for this pillow on a quilting blog and she made it seem so simple. Not. This stinking pillow took me hours to put together. I LOVE it but doubt I would ever take the time to make another one.

So there's a little sneak peek of the bedroom. I LOVE it and I'm so glad we decided to take the leap to paint the furniture. It feels so much more grown up and sophisticated to me now. I have some more really fun things to share about the room and can't wait to get settled in the new house so I can get it finished up and share!