Master Bedroom Makeover and Inspiration

After living in our house for a year, I am so happy to share with you that we finally started our master bedroom makeover.  We still have other rooms that are in the works (like our living room), but my husband had the week after Christmas off from work, and this room needed a lot of undivided attention.  In addition to just making it look pretty, there was a ton of repairs that needed to be done, and this was the perfect time to get started.

Our master bedroom is a room that we have been putting off for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost is the amount of repair it needed.  With the house being 90 years old there were a lot of cracks all over the walls.  We also needed to fix water damage, and there were several different issues with the moulding.  And, second, the room is upstairs, so it’s not a room that is seen by many people compared to other rooms in our house that need updating.  

Here are a couple of “before” pictures in all it’s glory.  As you can see, it was painted a lovely faux finish mustard yellow, and I was beyond excited to get some new color on the walls.  In my excitement, we had already started piling things up on the bed to get started when I remembered to take some pictures.  At least I remembered this time, though.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten the “before” pictures!

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The room is a decent size but has low ceilings, which curve down even lower near the windows.  One of our projects in redoing this room is to take down the crown moulding.  I know that sounds opposite of what most people do, but it’s not original to the house, and it’s not very pretty.   To accommodate the curve of the ceiling they left about a quarter-inch gap between the moulding and the ceiling when the crown moulding was installed.  Crown moulding also visually lowers the height of the ceiling, and we definitely don’t need that.

One of the big time consumers in making over this room was fixing a lot of damage.  Last year was one of the worst year’s in New England for the amount of snowfall we received, and we moved in right in the middle of it, so there was no way to prepare the house ahead of time.  We had water damage throughout our home due to ice dams, and the master bedroom was one of the rooms affected.  In addition, we had old water damage that hadn’t been fixed, and chipped paint on the moulding that had just been painted over instead of being scraped and sanded.

We also needed to replace a section of baseboard that didn’t match the rest of the room.  It was highly visible because it was directly opposite of the door to the room.   It wasn’t possible to match the existing moulding because of the age of the house, but we were able to get close, and replaced the entire section along this wall, making it less noticeable.  There was also a weird outlet halfway up the wall that needed to be removed.

Here you can see that the wood floors shrunk over time and were pulling away from the baseboard leaving large gaps.   To cover up these gaps, we added quarter round moulding throughout the room.

Since we knew we would be redoing this room sometime in the near future, we never bothered to do things like mount the tv to the wall or try to hide cords.  We also have a cable box that I would like to hide behind our tv, so that the dresser is completely free of electronics.   

Here are some rooms that have elements that I’m thinking of incorporating into my new bedroom…

I really love the coziness of the dark walls with some bright accents.  Sprinkle in a little gold and maybe some white marble accents (I just love how the white marble really pops against a dark background), and I think we are on our way to a new master bedroom.

We’ve already managed to get quite a lot of the work done, so I’ll be back soon with a progress report and some updated pictures, along with our official “to do” list.