My Bedroom Looks Like A Grownup's Bedroom Now!

At the beginning of this year, our family made up a list of family goals for 2016, and hung it on a wall in our kitchen. I even laminated it to make it extra official; thank goodness for my new laminator! One of my goals was to (finally!) paint our stairwell. The only paint there is the flat, ugly, cheap white paint the previous owners used when our house went onto the market.

Now, after five years in this house (wow, has it been that long already??), that paint has been steadily leaching off onto the little greasy fingers of countless children, as they have run up and down the stairs while rubbing their hands all over the walls. The pony wall at the top of the stairs is similarly gross-looking, with the top rim of the stairs rimmed in brown; the white coat of paint (such as it was) is virtually gone. The railings aren't in much better shape; it's somewhat easier to clean them, but they are also painted white, and as a result, they often look very grimy.

In case you couldn't tell, I am very sick of our ugly stairwell! At the same time, however, Nathan and I are both pretty nervous about painting it; we recognize that it's going to be a tricky job and require a few supplies we don't currently own. The ceiling in our stairwell is the highest reach in our house, and we are nervous about painting around the stairs (and their carpet!) as well. It's no wonder we keep putting it off! But this year, I told myself in January, I am REALLY going to paint that stairwell!

But suddenly, life interfered with my big plans (as it so often does!), and a different room of the house acquired my attention: our master bedroom!

Honestly, I'd planned on painting our bedroom last. We aren't in it all that often, and the flat paint in that room is in pretty decent shape. However, what we hadn't expected was all the new furniture we received in the early months of this year:

Grandma Barrett decided to trade out her king-sized bed for a different model, and she decided to pass the previous bed on to us! We were not exactly looking for a new mattress, but we were happy to get one nonetheless (our previous mattress was several years old, and the mattress we were receiving was only two or three years old, and lightly used). Best of all though, this new mattress came with a full bed frame and headboard. We would actually have a "proper" bed to sleep on, rather than just a mattress and box spring. For the first time as a married couple, we felt like we were sleeping in an "adult's" bed!

But the bed wasn't the only furniture we received. Sandy also gifted us two full-sized dressers she was replacing as well. Now we had more dressers in our home than we knew what to do with! Nathan and I had been using two older dressers for our clothes for pretty much our entire marriage. We decided to "adopt" the two new dressers, and gift our older dressers to the girls. This gift was a bit premature, though...right now, Celeste and Aurora are still sharing a bedroom (and dresser), and will continue to share them until the wintertime. So for now, our old dressers are sitting in their bedroom, empty and unused (however, they are accumulating a layer of "girl projects/junk" on their surfaces!).

The new dressers, combined with the new bed, convinced me it was time to paint our master bedroom, so I could "complete" the look of the room. Seeing all the furniture up there made me eager to see our bedroom in a finished form. The stairwell would have to wait while we completed this new project! Nathan and I didn't want any fancy colors in our room, but we wanted them to be soothing and neutral. We ultimately settled on two different shades of blue-gray; a lighter one for the walls with windows, and a darker one for the opposite (accent) wall.

Painting the bedroom was a chore, as I feared it would be. Most of the labor fell to me, while Nathan and the kids were at work and school, respectively. The room was big enough that I had to paint it in stages, moving heavy furniture back and forth (with Nathan's help, mostly) to expose one wall at a time. In our master bedroom, we have a heavy bed, two heavy dressers, two heavy nightstands, and a very heavy bookcase! Moving them all back and forth over a week's time was sweaty work.

At one point, I also ran out of paint (curse you, large room!), and had to run all the way up to Tucson to buy more. Due to that (as well as other family business/extracurriculars), I was delayed from continuing the project for several days. It was frustrating, but there was nothing to be done. It was a little unnerving to fall asleep at night with my big new dresser in the center of the room, looming over our bed!

The girls did offer to help me a little, and they did a nice enough job when they were home. Nathan also helped me do the taping and sealing for the room. However, I ended up doing most of the work on my own. It was exhausting, but very rewarding when it was finally all done. Our bedroom almost felt like a whole new place!

The cool colors add a nice illusion of cool weather, even in the heat of the summer. All the pictures looked much better on the newly painted walls, and the dressers and bookshelf looked snappier somehow, too. For the first day or so after painting was completed, it almost felt as if we were sleeping in a hotel (having an all-new bed to go with the all-new paint job helped aid that illusion, too). I wish the project hadn't taken so long (it took about seven days of on-and-off work), but Nathan and I were very happy with the results nonetheless.

We still want to paint the stairwell soon, of course! At that point, the loft and upstairs hallways will be the last painting projects in our home. What a great feeling that will be to have all the rooms in our house painted! Seeing our "new" bedroom was also a reminder to me that our entire upstairs is going to undergo some big changes in the next year. Our loft has served as a toy/play room for many years; by Christmastime, most of those toys will be sold, a computer and desk will be installed, and the television and futon will have moved into the loft to make room for Celeste and her stuff in that third bedroom. Our kids are getting older, and they don't need as many toys any more. Our former "toy room" is going to metamorphose into a general "activity/work room," and it will be interesting to see how it looks when all is said and done.