woody

oh pile of reclaimed barn wood.

we have plans for you!

Hay DLM

My Bend table will be heading back outdoors soon so I need to get a new bedside table. I'm thinking about the Hay DLM... and then I have to decide on a color. A bigger bed sounds really good to me too! First things first.

bedroom update (very slight updates)

Made a few changes in the bedroom over the last 5 months. Back in October, I scored a cute grey quilt on clearance at of all places... Meijer! If you don't know Meijer, it's a notch above Walmart yet not as good as Target combined with a huge grocery store. It's also the best place around here to get avacados and Gruyere cheese, go figure. So what a shocker it was to find such a lovely quilt on clearance at a Meijer. I decided to make yellow my slight accent color and I've been searching for a piece of wool fabric in a black, grey, yellow plaid so I can make my dream throw pillow. I'm pretty sure I will end up buying a plaid flannel shirt in the men's department at Target once it hits the clearance racks. It's not exactly that yellow plaid I'm hunting for but I can make a pillow out of it until I find "the one". My Bend outdoor table found a new home indoors as a bed side table and I'm loving it there. This means I have about 4 months to find its replacement once it becomes patio furniture season again. Back to Target, they've got some fantastic faux fur throws - I've got one on the Eames shell chair and Lottie's got one for her bed...so spoiled. Everything else in the bedroom is pretty much the same. Same artwork, same light fixtures, same rugs, same Ikea Henny throw on the bed (the one that I was totally obsessed with last year), and the same Skinny Laminx pillow. Like I said, this is a very slight update.

morning sunlight

bedroom

BEFORE

Our room was painted a light bluish grey. This before pic is from the 2008-2009 years (sort of hate this now)...


And in August 2010, it was looking like this (meh)...




AND AFTER (as of November 2010)










I think our bedroom make-over is complete. A different quilt on the bed would be nice. Maybe I'll add a plant since I've got an empty white bullet planter. An Arne Jacobsen AJ table lamp (yes - the one for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen) would be my fantasy addition. But for now, I'm pretty happy with the way it looks. Not sure if I have ever talked about the big white art piece above the bed. There is a window on that wall that is not centered and is just awkward. The only way to make the room work was to cover it up. Plus I have a phobia of sleeping with my head under a window. Mark and I made that sculpture painting pretty easily - Mark made a similar piece that is hanging in the dining room.

paint

I didn't plan to paint this past weekend however I had an unusual Saturday morning and it ended up raining all day so I cancelled my original plans and painted.  Three walls in Ace brand Linen and one accent wall at the head of the bed in Benjamin Moore Winter Solstice.  I was so tired of the previous light bluish grey color (Behr's Cool Sky) and although this isn't dramatically different, I like it so much better.  I still need to do some touch ups and paint the ceiling.  So far so good.

Target

I have a Target less than 2 miles from my house. That said I go there a lot. And I always find something great that I wasn't expecting. I heart Target!!

5 years ago when we bought the house, we put Enje roller blinds and the Kvadrant panel curtain rail systems from Ikea up in every window. I never really liked the Kvadrant panel curtains in our bedroom but somehow a way more important project always took priority over getting different curtains in there. 5 years ago Mark was also smart enough to buy a bunch of different options for the Kvadrant rail system including two packs of hook things. I think his thought process at the time was "I'm just going to buy all the little extra things Ikea sells for the Kvadrant curtain system so I do not have to come back". And now Kvadrant has been replaced at Ikea by something different so if I needed them now I would have been out of luck!




Not sure how this happened but I actually put those hook things someplace where I was able to find them 5 years later. I bet they were compatible with some line of curtains Ikea sold at that time. I took a good look at them and figured out how I could use them with the $14.99 curtain panels I had just purchased at Target (beacause I left Ikea exhausted and without new curtains for our bedroom and Target did not let me down!).



So I got out the trusty Viking and a roll of twill tape and MacGuyvered up those curtain panels to work with the hooks. Totally easy.




And now I have curtains that I love!




Because I'm still using the old rail system, I was able to put each curtain panel on a different track (there are three tracks on this rail) so one panel can completely cover the other one if I need to double them up for some privacy. These new curtains are pretty sheer...we do have a giant lilac bush in front of this window so privacy isn't a huge issue.

While shopping for the curtains I also picked up these $29 suede shoes...

Ikea

I have a serious love hate relationship with Ikea. It takes almost an hour to get to the nearest location (or an hour and a half when traffic is jammed up) and costs $6.20 in highway tolls for the round trip. Oh and the bonus... the only time I can go is on the weekend when it's a swarming madhouse. Sigh. After putting it off for months I finally made the journey a couple of Saturdays ago. And once I was there, defeated by traffic and an already super crowded store, I decided to buy anything and everything that I ever wanted from Ikea because I was never coming back (yeah, right).

Got all the staples I needed from Ikea like new towels, replacement dishes and bowls for ones that we had broken over the past year, and cheap $7 throw blankets for the couch Lottie is slowly destroying. I bought the Henny throw-bedspread that I had become obsessed with and a couple of sets of grey sheets. Also picked up the Alvine Rand rug (Ikea stock photo here)- mine is still rolled up in its plastic wrap until I have time to tackle the spare room which is where this rug is going (I think).



I had no idea what I was going to do with this round mini-cowhide thing they're selling for $9.99...

... and it ended up looking good on the dining room table.


Bought this small white wire table with a white glass top in the scratch and dent section for $14. Have since decided that it's perfect as Mark's bedside and his glass of ice water he needs while he sleeps... won't talk about the tragedy of the Hey-Wake bedside and the faulty coaster incident...still too painful. So $14 table that requires no coaster is a big winner!



Now with that new bedsie table decision I ended up moving all sorts of things around and brought in things from other rooms and then changed my mind on the new paint color 12 times. Wow what a trainwreck! I did settle on one color and I bought the paint. Now I just need to find the time to do the painting.


Mark made this tripod lamp about 4 years ago and it has made an appearance in just about every room of our house. Of course I had to try it out in the bedroom! It was my Grandpa's tripod. He was an amazing photographer and most of the black and white photographs in our house are his taken in the 1940s and 1950s.


The only thing on my Ikea shopping list that I didn't come home with was curtains for our bedroom. No worries, there is always Target!