Painting the Bedroom (Again)

So I previously alluded that I wasn’t too happy with the wall color in our “master” bedroom. Sure, it was lighter than the original navy blue, but it always felt too “baby blue” for my tastes. We put darker accents in the room (dark gray quilt, curtains, etc), but it never stopped feeling like we were sleeping in a cloud (which, I suppose, isn’t the worst feeling you could get in a bedroom).

Not the best photo, but you get the gist. This was before we had a bed frame or, for that matter, any other furniture.

At the end of the day, it just wasn’t what we had in mind. But it’s worth it to point out — we couldn’t properly express what we had in mind. Or at least I couldn’t… perhaps Alex was envisioning something totally different. The best explanation I could come up with was “bluey-gray or gray-blue”, but that wasn’t really cutting it, because there are many, many colors that could fit that description.

Then one day we were at Ikea, and noticed that one of the example rooms had a great gray-blue color on the walls. Thinking “why mess with success?”, we wrote down the color and planned on heading directly to the nearest Benjamin Moore store to get it.

I don’t remember the name of the color we intended on buying, but we didn’t end up getting that one.

See, our local Benjamin Moore store has an in-house designer / “color expert” on staff who gives out advice at specific times during the week. As luck would have it, she was in when we came to pick up our would-be-new-bedroom-color. At the time, we didn’t feel like we were lucky — we just came in to buy a color, no questions asked, and instead we got ambushed with a million and one questions, and a 2-hr long lesson on color theory. My head was swimming while I heard such nonsensical (to me) things as “mmm…. that’s a lot of pigment”, “you young people want a really bold color, but don’t know what you’re looking for”, “this blue color doesn’t actually have any blue in it”, “just because it looks one way in one room doesn’t mean it will look the same in another room”, and “this has reds and yellows in it, so it’s a perfect neutral and plays nice with other colors” ……. Uhhh, what???

It was really an overwhelming experience … but eventually, the designer (who shall remain nameless, since I don’t know if saying we were “ambushed” counts as libel), dropped a little tidbit that she had been the designer for the local eco-salon Lux. Alex and I both love that place, not just for the fabulous haircuts (we both go there), but because the renovated historic building is just gorgeous. So we went from “we’ve got to get out of here and never come back” to begrudgingly agreeing to give her “put these large swatches up first” system a try.

And in the end, we decided on BM’s Province Blue (#2135-40). It was the perfect blue-gray shade I had been envisioning — a lot “darker” (I don’t even know if I’m using the right color-language) than the blue we originally got, but without feeling heavier (if that’s even an appropriate description).

I cannot express how happy I am with this new shade. It is absolutely perfect. The room feels calming, sophisticated, but not overbearing. While I am always anxious about running into this designer-lady in the store whenever I pick up paint, I can’t deny that she steered us towards the absolute perfect color for our room.

Ignore the sloppy ceiling-paint (we’ll eventually be adding crown moulding to class it up a bit)

From left to right: Too-pale and just right

The photos above are definitely making it appear more green than it actually is (the ones below are more true, but still not perfect)  — so you’ll just have to take my word on it: it’s the perfect bluish-gray color for a bedroom. Once we brought in the gray curtains, and wrought-iron bed frame, then lightened it up with an off-white quilt and night stands, the room is a great relaxing sanctuary (with a way-too-big-for-the-room king sized bed … but my commitment to scale does not extend past my comfort, so the king bed stays, no matter how cartoonish it looks).

To top it off, we finally got a frame for the bed (oooh! I feel so grown up), and with some spruced up Ikea bedside tables (which I painted with Annie Sloan chalk paint & roughed up a bit), I’d say we’ve got a pretty nice looking bedroom (it’s making me crazy that I didn’t think to make the curtains even before I snapped this shot — ahh, OCD!)

Ooooh! Ahhhh! (Yes, the bed is way too huge for the room. But I will not negotiate on this). If I do say so myself, those hardwood floors are lookin’ goooooood. Refinishing them was such a good idea. And ignore the canvas that is just leaned on top of the headboard — I wanted to see how it looked in that spot before hanging it (and I think the verdict is: looks good).

Here’s another shot that makes the room look a little bigger than it really is (and also shows off my “I’m just going to put this here, on top of the air filter” method of clothing storage). Thank you, wide-angle lens!

There’s still a good amount of decor that needs to be done in there (two giant bare walls aren’t my idea of stylish), and we’re almost certainly going to add some crown moulding, but for now I’d say the new paint color goes a long way towards making the room better looking.

Painting the Bedroom

While the house was totally move-in ready, we wanted to get some painting done before we officially moved in. Since our closing date was a few weeks before our move, we had a couple of weekends to come up and get some work done.

The first room to paint was the master bedroom. The person we bought the house from had done a great job taking care of it, but his style of decor was very masculine, heavy, and dark. Nothing wrong with that, but since the house is a row home, and therefore only has windows on the front and back, we wanted to lighten up a few of the darker rooms, to bring some more brightness into the house.

The room we choose to use as the master is at the front of the house, and was painted a dark navy blue.

The “Master Bedroom”, before painting – view from the windows towards the hallway

As an aside, since the house was built in 1900, there’s no real “master” bedroom – they’re all relatively the same size, although of the three rooms on the second floor, one doesn’t have a closet, so that was out of the running automatically. The layout of the 3rd room was somewhat L-shaped, and we thought it would make a great office. There is a fourth bedroom (and a very very large “closet” room that just couldn’t legally be considered a bedroom because of the size) on the third floor, which might make a good master bedroom, but we are fairly sure we couldn’t fit our king-sized mattress up that second flight of stairs.

We were going for a light gray-blue shade, and I gave Alex the final decision after picking several swatches. He ended up picking a color that I thought was too “baby-blue”, but I figured his ideas deserve a chance, too!

Just putting primer on the wall made a difference in making the room look brighter. Also, the lighter color really accentuated the 9-foot ceilings. With the darker shade on the wall, the additional height wasn’t as noticeable. But the extra square footage was definitely noticed when we were painting it — it took a lot of extra time and paint than shorter walls!

When we were finished, the color was a little too light for my taste — a color looks more intense on a tiny little paint swatch than covering a large area, such as a wall. But at the time, the only thing in the room was a king-sized bed with only white sheets and blankets — it felt like we were “sleeping in the clouds”, as Alex put it. Since then, we got a dark-grey quilt, some dark-grey drapes for the window, and some mirrors to hang above the bed, to bring the airiness down a little bit. The picture at right shows the bed/mirror combination, although it doesn’t show the wall color very well – it’s a very pale shade of blue, and I believe it was night when the photo was taken.

Rating: How Hard Could It Be? …. easy. I am an incredibly sloppy painter, and even I managed to make it look OK.