Decorating on a Dime Part 1

Where do I begin? I guess I first need to figure out who to blame for my crazy weekend of redecorating. I could blame my mother. She started quilting a few years ago and she's really good at it. So she decided to make each of my sister-in-laws and myself a quilt for our beds. Well the time came for me to pick out material for my quilt. That was tough. I love all kinds of color combinations and all kinds of decorative styles. I think a quilt made by your mother is as close to an heirloom as one can get and so I wanted to pick colors that would be classic, timeless. I went with black and white. You can't get anymore simple than that, right? However, our current bedroom isn't decorated in black and white...although, it's not really decorated in anything.

OR

I could blame Carma and Dorinda, my two "old roomies". These girls taught me to jump in and just do it - who cares if you've never done it before? I still remember the day I arrived in Salem. I drove up to the new home I was to be sharing with Carma, Dorinda, and Rachel. I was a little nervous. They greeted me, showed me my room, helped me unload my things and then said, "So did you bring work clothes?" I replied yes and they officially invited me to help them "redo the basement". I welcomed the chance to do something and not just sit around and be awkward with my new friends. I changed clothes went down stairs to do what I thought would be something like cleaning or painting...before I knew it I had operated a hammer-drill to bust up some old concrete, went to the saw mill and planed lumber for a wooden wall and used a shop vac to suck up old coal dust from a coal bin where we would later put that wall for which we had planed lumber.

OR

I could blame Charity. I remember years ago, my long time friend Nate brought this sweet girl around and told us he was going to marry her. So like any good friend I tried to become friends with Charity as well. When girls are becoming friends they talk girl stuff until they find something of substance that they have in common. Charity and I were talking about her future home and how she planned to decorate. She said something like, "One thing I do not want is for our bedroom to be the hang out spot in the house. A place where the laundry gets dumped and the kids run in and out." Several years later, as I looked at my bedroom with piles of things we never know where else to put and baskets of laundry and trim that has never been put up and dry wall mud that's never been painted, I can hear Charity's voice in my head. :)

So dear reader I'll let you decide who is to blame. All I know is that I've been dreaming of a bedroom retreat for quite sometime and so when Mom said she was quilting and Dori and Carma said they'd come help paint, the project began.

At the end of last week Matt and I completely emptied our bedroom into our living room, this is what it looked like.....

While I don't consider myself a Martha Stewert, this kind of mess drives me batty. This is real motivation for me to get the bedroom done. I do not want to look at this disaster all next week. Not to mention, I promised myself nothing would go back in the bedroom unless it had a home...so there is sorting to be done and a van load will be heading to the local thrift store next week.

Once the room was empty, I was able to sand the drywall mud that Matt had finished spreading. On Friday night and Saturday morning my Super Roomies came to help me paint.

Matt and I rarely buy anything til we have cash for it. Therefore after over 10 years of marriage the only brand new furniture we own is our living room furniture. We don't have any official bedroom furniture. But recently, Matt's grandma moved out of her apartment and gave us a queen sized bed and MATCHING dressers!! OK, so the dressers belonged to Matt's dad and uncle when they were high school....in the 60s, but they match. So I decided to update them by sanding them down and painting them. We have no headboard for our bed. However, I got the bright idea of painting one on the wall(like they do in hotel rooms) and so we girls put our heads together to come up with a design for the head board of the bed. This photo shows the beginnings of a headboard, a rectangle painted on the wall with $4.28 worth of wood trim around it. The black and white art you see on the floor is a canvas we painted and then spray painted a stencil on it. Cheap art is good.

Hopefully tomorrow we can get the headboard finished and our clothes back in our dressers and at least a semblance of order restored. So far I love how the room is coming together. The three nights of sleeping on the floor of the school room and the tornado like disaster in the rest of the house were worth it. I'll post the almost final photos tomorrow night....I hope. :)