John & Alice’s Master Bedroom — Before And After

Last Updated on March 2, 2013 by Kristi Linauer

Well, if you like lots and lots of pictures, then today is your lucky day! 🙂 I am absolutely tickled pink at how John & Alice’s bedroom turned out, and I’m so excited to show it to you. So excited, in fact, that I’m pretty sure I had my mom document every square inch of the room. So, you ready? Here goes…

First, let’s remember where this room started:

All of the furniture in the room matched.  The walls were a very light blue.

The corner windows were dressed with custom window treatments, but they were just a tad outdated.  🙂

More of the matching set of furniture.  There was also a matching chest of drawers that I didn’t get a picture of.

After all of the furniture was moved out so I could get ready to start the board and batten wall treatment, I snapped this photo…

The wall with the chairs is the wall where the headboard was. The doors lead to the master bathroom.  This picture shows more clearly the blue walls and pinkish carpet.

And now, the room looks a little bit different:

Quite a difference, huh?  Okay, I have about 100 more pictures, so go grab a cup of coffee and get comfy.  🙂

The headboard is made of fence pickets, and cost under $40 to make.  The side tables are made of MDF, and cost about $20 for both (not including the skirts).  I found the lamps at Marshall’s, but the color was all wrong, so I painted them and then covered the lampshades.  The linen bedskirt is custom, but the rest of the bedding came from Marshall’s.  I added the linen ruffle to the shams to pull the look together.

The chair was a Goodwill find for $30 and originally had bright yellow-gold fabric.  A canvas dropcloth from Home Depot gave it a new look.  The ottoman was already in the house, and I gave it a slipcover to coordinate with the chair.  I added ribbon and jute accents to both.

The draperies are also made from Home Depot canvas drop cloths.  I lined them with blackout lining and added ribbon trim to dress them up.  The shades are my favorites from Home Depot.

The pillow in the chair was made from a scrap of fabric from the bedside table skirts, and the ruffle edge is made from the leftover selvage from the fabric.  For the chair, I made little jute “buttons”.

A closer view of the ribbon trim added to the draperies.  I used 1 1/2″ green satin ribbon, and 3/8″ brown satin.

Adding a ruffle to a ready-made sham is an easy way to get a customized look for less money.  The pillow on the right is a very easy pillow to make, and requires very basic sewing skills.

The planter cup is from JoAnn Fabrics, and it was on clearance for around $3.75 because it had a chip in the rim.  It also had a crazy color and pattern on it–nothing a coat of spray paint couldn’t fix.  The books that I used in the room were all different colors, so I just covered them in brown packing paper.

I bought the dresser on Craigslist, and then gave it a complete makeover–I removed the apron and added feet, and then painted and antiqued it.

The doors in the room got a coat (or two) of black paint, which took them from dull to dramatic.

The lamp belonged to the homeowners, but was brass.  A coat of spray paint (Rustoleum Painter’s Touch in Oregano) and a new shade from Lowe’s gave this lamp new life.  The mirror was a “special buy” mirror from Home Depot, and I covered the cheap factory finish with a dry brush technique using some black and green paint to give the frame an antiqued look.

Glass jars were covered in jute to create some budget-friendly accents.

A wreath made from pages of a book adds texture to this area, and underneath sits my favorite find from “shopping” the house for accessories–the homeowner’s high school diploma.  I love the touch of nostalgia it adds, plus the colors of the frame and paper are absolutely perfect for the room.

Disclaimer:  Please don’t ever put candles on a wood plate and surround them with very flammable dried Spanish moss and leave them burning unattended!!

Did you notice the little jute rosettes I put on the front of the ottoman to coordinate with the jute buttons on the chair?  I forgot to have my mom take a closer picture of it.  Oh well.< Well, that's the whole tour.  I hope you enjoyed it!!  If I counted correctly, I have 15 d.i.y. projects in this room, and I'm working on getting all of the instructions written up for you--things like how to do board and batten walls, how to make an ottoman slipcover with a pleated skirt, how to recover a cane chair with tufted back, how to make a book page wreath, how to make lined draperies with ribbon detail, and much more. I also have one more project that I'd like to do for this room eventually--a patchwork bench using all of the leftover fabrics, to go at the foot of the bed.  But that will have to wait, because now it's time to move on to the master bathroom.