Bedroom Inspiration Board

We did the whole “decorating our bedroom” thing backwards. We had no idea what we wanted, just that we wanted to branch out from our typical blue color scheme and add some lighter colors to our bedroom. Most of our house is decorated in blues and browns, so we wanted something a little lighter and airier feeling.

Let’s start with a picture of the bedroom as it looked the day we got married. (I honestly cannot believe I’m putting some of these pictures on the blog, but hey, this room has been MAJORLY neglected. I’m definitely all about finishing the “common” areas first, but I’m so ready to add some oomph to this room!)

Yup, I know. It’s pathetic. The black dresser is now gone and that bedspread is in the guest room.

After our honeymoon, we had a few days in DFW and decided to make an IKEA run.

OK, first mistake, run. It’s not like you can ever just run into IKEA. You can live in IKEA. You can spend all day in IKEA, but you CAN NOT run into IKEA. Good thing I had some ideas in mind for what I wanted. I had fallen in love with this white HEMNES dresser online, so secretly, this is why we were going to IKEA.

We went. We spent. But we did not bring home the aforementioned white dresser. We did, however, buy two dressers, an entertainment center and a coffee table.

We ended up with the blue version of the long dresser and a shorter red one. I know what you’re thinking. Red and blue? Sparklers? Fireworks? Yah, we get the 4th of July-ness coming out in our dresser color choices. But I liked the blue one. And the hubby liked the red one. And like any newlywed couple fresh off the sandy shores of their wonderful honeymoon, we wanted to make each other happy. So we got both. I justified it in my mind by saying we wouldn’t just stick with red and blue, but we would focus more on one color and use the second as an accent.

Stop here. Can we please think for a second how friggin hard it is to find bedding that has red and blue in it that doesn’t look like our beloved Independence Day just threw up all over it. Because it is hard. Very hard. And I searched A LOT!

Well, we just happened to pop into a Pottery Barn while in town a few months later and I picked up the bedding and bath catalog to look at on our way home. The seas parted and Heaven shined a big, bright light down on the page with this bedding! Holy freakin moly! This is perfect! Blue and red and other colors. No images of fireworks were popping into my head. Look at that gorgeous quilt. So plush and beautiful and cottagy and everything I wanted in our bedding. It was the Pottery Barn Clearlake collection.

I bet you know where this is going don’t you? I get home and get online and I’m ready to pay the outrageous amount of $200 or something and I go to select Queen…

and it’s not an option. Only king. No queen. So my “glass half full” side says to call the good ole PB and some nice lady will find it for me and we’ll all be on our way. Nope. No nice lady for me. She says they don’t know if it will come back in. So I call again the next day. And for like two weeks straight after that. Nothing. Then it disappears on their web site. Long story short, I search eBay and do all the normal things you do to find something that is no longer available in store, and I returned empty handed. I even so rudely begged Layla in a comment over at The Lettered Cottage for hers that she got for her birthday.

So I moved on. (Well, I’m trying to. I still do a Google search every once in a while to see if someone was dumb enough to put their quilt on eBay or something.) After lots and lots of thinking and comparing and accepting the fact that no bedding would ever live up to the lovely Clearlake quilt, I settled on the Doyle Stripe Duvet. It’s no Clearlake, but it works, and it is light and airy and it doesn’t scream 4th of July when I look at it. Have you seen it before? This picture is from the PB site. Although I wished our room looked this cozy, I can’t claim this space as my own.

So this is now my inspiration picture. I love the white bed and wood planked walls. I do not yet have a white coverlet, but I have my eye on this king size one at Target. I want the king because a.) it only comes in that size and b.) I always feel like queen comforters are too small for queen beds. This summer I want to build this farmhouse bed from Ana White, with a few alterations. And I’ll probably repaint our room because I want to lighten the walls up a bit.

So this is actually what my post is really supposed to be about- inspiration for our bedroom. Sorry about my chapter long rant about my undying love of Pottery Barn’s Clearlake quilt.

The first thing I want to do is pick out a semi-nuetral paint color for the walls. I’m thinking a blue-grey or beige-gray and here are some that I found on the Sherwin Williams site. Of course, in person and on a wall they will look different than on a computer screen, but I want to narrow it down to about 4-5 choices then test each one. If you have any good ideas, please let me know. There are wwwwaaaaaaayyyyy to many paint colors out there for me to go through, so if you have a go-to color, I want to know about it!

My top three favorites out of these are greek villa, rhinestone and spare white. Ivory Lace may be too close to the color we have now and timid blue may have too much green in it to go with our furniture. If the snowdrop had a little more white and gray in it, then that would be perfect.

So here it is, the inspiration board that will hopefully turn our dingy bedroom into our own cottage oasis.

Almost everything on the board is from IKEA. Their site is easy to look through and has lots of great ideas. I’m not saying everything will come from there, but I do love their stuff!

Ok, so on the inspiration board I went with Rhinestone for my paint color. Hopefully I will find something with a little more beige in it, then it will be perfect. I’ll probably go gather more paint chips this weekend than I’ll ever know what to do with.

The curtains are MERETE from IKEA, although I will make my own like I did for the dining room. I’m thinking an all white curtain with a thick stripe of khaki at the bottom. I love crisp, white curtains and they will be ceiling to floor just like the other ones I made.

The red dresser is the HEMNES 3-drawer chest from IKEA, and the blue dresser is the HEMNES 8-drawer chest. We already own these two pieces. These are great dressers if you need lots of storage space, and you can even paint them like Kate did over at Centsational Girl.

We will probably build some shelves to get a custom length and I want to put them above the bed. I’m not sure how many I want, but I may put some next to our window also. I do want them to float for a super clean line on the wall.

The bed in the picture is the APSELUND bed frame from IKEA, but like I said before, we will build our own version of the farmhouse bed from Ana White. We already own the Doyle Stripe duvet cover from Pottery barn, but I would like to get some throw pillows to add to it.

I mentioned before that I want to build a custom side table, but I do like the HEMNES chest. If I get the chest from IKEA, I want to customize it by turning the drawers into a door so I could have a cabinet for extra blankets and pillows.

The lamps, glass vases and picture frames are also all from IKEA. I would love to bring in some old blue Ball jars too, and I already have some frames that will go on the shelves. I may decide to paint some of the frames a light blue or green and distress them to add a little more color in the room. And I want to bring a few live plants in to add some greenery to our oasis.

So there you have. My first inspiration board. And a dream bedroom. Hopefully I can have our bedroom done by the end of summer with a pretty tight budget!