A while back I got a call from a college friend asking if I could help give her master bedroom a makeover. She had recently undergone knee surgery, and after spending a long period of time largely confined to bed {i.e., a lot of time staring at the four walls of her bedroom}, she had a long list of things about the room that weren’t working for her.
More than once her husband even came home to discover that she’d ripped down drapes or removed some other element of the room that she just couldn’t stand looking at any longer {all against doctor’s orders, of course}! She was ready for a new, more sophisticated look, but she needed help coming up with a plan to refresh the space without starting over.
The day that I met with her to see the bedroom, she was apologetic that the room was a bit of a mess, but I assured her there was no need to be sorry! In fact, I find it helpful to see how someone really lives in a space in order to ensure that we create a design plan that is realistic and livable for the family.
There were several items in the room that the couple was ready to remove. Their toddler son was quickly outgrowing the changing table in the corner. And since her knee rehab {and therefore her confinement to bed} was finally coming to an end, she no longer wanted the television on the dresser and no longer needed the stationery bike right next to the bed.
The couple doesn’t particularly like the yellow-ish color of the wood on their fireplace mantle or on the baseboards throughout the room. However, since this wood matches the rest of the house, and the couple had plans to move in a few years, we quickly made the decision that painting the wood wouldn’t be the right choice from a resale perspective. {This quickly turned out to be an especially good choice since an out of town job offer caused them to put the house on the market right after this room makeover was complete!}
Instead, we needed to find a way to make the yellow-tone of the wood, as well as the golden-brown of the fireplace tile make sense within the design plan.
Some of the furniture in the room was working well, and some was not. The couple liked their black dresser and chest of drawers, and they are in good shape, so there was no need to replace them. At the foot of the bed was a large, brown leather bench {covered in a blanket in this photo}. The bench was very deep – causing it to crowd the dresser a bit, and because the bench was solid all the way to the ground, it was taking up a lot of visual space in the room.
