Our Bedroom, in the Beginning

I said I would share our DIY adventures in our bedroom, and I thought I'd start by sharing what our bedroom looked like when we started. First of all, above you can see what it looked like just over three years ago when my husband did the walk-through before we bought it. The previous owners used the master bedroom as an office. That explains the bookshelf wallpaper border. There's really no explanation for the amount of stuff in there. It looked marginally better when we came to see it while house hunting, but I'm afraid at least one of the ladies we bought it from had issues with compulsive hoarding. I think you could say at this point the bedroom was dark and without form.

Below is a picture taken from the same angle in April of this year. This is taken from the door of the bedroom.  We had made a few changes, but besides new windows, they're pretty minor. The valance didn't stay with the house. We took down the existing mini-blinds and hung the curtains when we added these. At that point I took down the border on the wall with the windows. Other than that we had put up some pictures, and I purchased a bunch of fabric, some of which I used to make covers for the rocking chair. We also installed the light fixture on the fan. It's not beautiful, but it's functional. You can see we had also tested our new paint colors on the wall.

 
The house was built in 1989, and this was the original carpeting. When we bought the house we had bamboo floors installed in kitchen, great room, and hallway. James steam cleaned the carpeting in the bedrooms before we moved in, and we planned to put in new floors in the bedrooms the next year. But James's job situation was in flux that year, so we waited. Then the next summer we decided it would be better to take advantage of the tax rebates and install new windows. So now here we are three years later, and we are so excited to be getting rid of the grungy 20+ year old carpeting in the bedrooms. It may look unobjectionable in that picture, but trust me, it was in bad shape.  We had decided to wait to paint this room until we put in the new flooring, not realizing it would be such a long wait. Our bedroom has looked pretty much like this most of the time we've lived here.

Here are a few more angles. In the picture below, the doorway is just outside the frame on the right.

  

Around the corner below you can see the edge of door to the closet. Behind the wall with the bookcases is the bathroom.  I'll share pictures of the closet and bathroom and the projects going on in those areas another day.

 

Our bedroom was reasonably tidy in these pictures, but these before pictures also keep it pretty real with the clutter on top of the bookcases and laundry baskets. We've got plans to address those things after we put everything back together. The bedroom is a good size, which is one of the reasons we chose this house. We thought it had a lot of potential. We've made a lot of progress toward realizing that potential now. Next time, I'll talk about the first project I completed, which was taking down the rest of the border.