New bedroom with feature wall

I’m sure you’ve noticed that things have been a little quiet around here lately. That’s because our house has gone through some major construction these past few weeks. Over the past few weeks, we got a long awaited upgrade in the form of a new bedroom with feature wall.

But, before we get to the room, I should give a little backstory. You see, t’s been an exhausting few months. Health concerns both for me and in our extended family, the death of a beloved grandparent, and now navigating a very new and hard path in helping my mother has made for a mentally exhausting spring and summer. So, in typical Leanne fashion, I also made it physically exhausting as well.

I needed something to keep my mind off of things, and apparently I also needed something that made sure I fell into bed at night as physically exhausted as I was mentally. As hard as it was to also have my entire house torn apart, it also was a good time for change. While I was busy on dozens of phone calls a day and keeping to-do lists that stretched into multiple sheets of paper, it was also nice to feel like I was also doing something for me. Something to look forward to, and something that I could see daily progress on as I toiled away.

But, it was hard. Hard to not have a room to escape to. Hard to be painting every day for almost a month. Hard to be moving entire rooms full of stuff all by myself. And, it was especially hard because I’m also nursing a fractured tailbone.

It’s been a fun year, let me tell ya.

Our bedroom design process

It all started with a dream: having a room that I can escape to when I just can’t take it anymore and need peace and calm. My bedroom for the past 15 years was anything but “calm”. We were on yellow paint #2, and it was terrible. Trial #1 was an epic fail, which I put up with for 9 years before trying again, and the yellow paint #2 was marginally better.

To add to awful choice{s} in wall paint, our carpet was pretty much garbage since a month or two after move in. The carpet was never stretched properly when it was installed, so it had lines of humps that ran across the entire room side-to-side. They were so bad that I would literally trip on them sometimes. No joke. We thought about re-stretching the carpet until we spoke to a neighbor who had a similar issue and he said that re-stretching it didn’t work. The humps were back again almost immediately. So, we just put up with it. For almost 15 years.

Behold, the “before” picture. To be completely fair, construction had already started at this point as you can see from the wood leaning against the wall and the paint samples above the bed. But, also to be fair, you can’t see the terrible mess on the other side of the room that was definitely still there. Also, you can’t even see the carpet that well in the shot, so it looks a million times better than it did in person.

Bottom line: we’ve hated the room for a really long time. But, you know how it is when you have kids. Somehow your bedroom becomes the catch-all, and everything gets shoved in there whenever it needs to get out of the main living spaces. And, in our case, you also hate the color you painted. Twice. And, also in our case, your carpet is absolute garbage.

Here’s a closeup of the carpet so you can see I’m not exaggerating. All those lines are humps in the carpet, and all of them are even bigger than they appear in this photo.

The plan

I came up with the idea that we would do a “feature wall” on the wall that houses our bed and holds our huge canvas portrait. Then, in the sitting room leading to the bedroom, we would put two bookcases on either side of the arch. And, we’d finally paint over the hideous yellow paint, and the obnoxiously boring beige of the sitting room.

New carpets would be down the road even further, but they were also agreed upon ahead of time. We were excited about the projects, but it wasn’t something that we had a timeline on. And, then everything shut down. Wood prices went sky high, basic home repair items were sold out everywhere, and our project almost fell apart completely.

A whole lot of craftiness and a ton of paint later, and I’ve finally got some of the things I had only dreamt of. Plus a whole bunch of things I hadn’t anticipated – some good and some bad.

The new bedroom redo reveal

We’re nowhere near done with the tiny details, and it’s going to be a work in progress for at least a few more weeks. But, at this point I’m thrilled that it’s back to looking like a bedroom. And, that it doesn’t look anything at all like the bedroom we started with. As you see, I not only got my new bedroom with feature wall, I also got my bookcases.

And, I got new trim throughout. Here’s a few in process shots showing the scope of the trim work for the new bedroom feature wall.

Oh, and did I mention brand new floors? Swoon.

It was so much work, and so tiring for weeks and weeks. But, now it’s at the point where we’re just decorating and adding a bit of trim here and there.

Did you see that boho light on the nightstand in the first “after” shot? That’s going to eventually hang on the wall, one on either side of the bed. The bookcases will eventually have items placed decoratively upon them instead of randomness that we’ve found and don’t quite know what to do with. This wall above will look a whole lot less plain and boring.

But, I don’t even see any of that when I look at these pictures. I see an almost complete transformation of our bedroom to the point that the before and afters are only vaguely recognizable as the same room. And, that delights me.