It's been a challenging week: this beer school is kicking my ass, and I'm working on it now in between sips of Arcadia Hop Rocket; money is super super tight... but to balance that out, my mom came to visit for a night this week on her way to Florida. Last time she came down, we spent half a day shopping and came out with decorations for my apartment (she spent a seriously absurd amount of money on this task, incidentally; but we ended up with curtains, storage units, dust mop, air filtration system, wall hangings, etc etc etc). This trip, we were on a much smaller scale due to financial restraints and, as importantly, time constraints--last time we had a night to drink and bond and then a whole day to shop and decorate, while this time we only had the night due to my work schedule and her flight.
Mom arrived bearing many, many gifts: a mini-convection oven/broiler/toaster/rotisserie, two chairs for my dining nook table, a bed frame and risers, cleaning products, a garden hose....and, best of all, two bedside chests and the promise of a six-foot-long chest of drawers to match. Most of this came from her house, but the bedroom set she found at a resale shop for dirt cheap. (My mother is one hell of a bargain hunter, it turns out.) The night was spent scrubbing my porch and screens, which had been coated in dust from the road construction outside; hanging all my curtains and swags; rearranging furniture; drilling holes into my walls; reorganizing my closets; constructing shoe holders; and finally.....
My bedroom is just missing the chest of drawers to make it complete. I've always been a fan of neutrals for rooms (accent colors make the room at any rate, and having neutral walls and flooring make accents pop and are MUCH cheaper to re-do when you're ready for a change) and this room came all set up: beige walls with creamy white trim. The room itself is probably 10'x14'x11' (it's seriously enormous), so initially, my queen bed was lost in the vast space around it. It's got a 6' bay window in the north wall, so there's a ton of natural light as well. The room echoed, too: it's got original, beautiful hardwood floors and plaster walls, and while I'm a big fan of a spartan bedroom, it needed some softening to get it where I really wanted it. My comforter is light cream flannel; the sheets are vivid marine blue fleece. The curtains we picked out are, oddly enough, the exact same ones that my sister-in-law hung in her house--then my mom fell in love with them and bought them for my room at her house--and after three hours of peering though curtains at three stores, they were still my favorites, so I got a set of side panels myself. The window is now edged in a dusty aqua with cream embroidery, with a creamy-colored swag over the top. The entire effect (creamy swag, aqua side panels, blue sheets, cream swag, beige walls, white trim, dark floors, and white cabinets with light green tops) gave the idea of being stuck inside a cloud, or a Lake Michigan wave with whitecaps, in a canopy bed. The dark floors match the new dark wood furniture perfectly, and the crazy part is that the side curtains exactly match the paint color in my kitchen nook.
Basically.... my bedroom feels like home now:
The picture isn't that great--it came from my phone--but it should give the general idea.Time to get to work, again....
