A budget-friendly bedroom makeover that demonstrates how you can upgrade what you already own and use it to totally transform the look of a room.
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Let me show you a few pictures of what this bedroom looked like right after we moved into the house 4½ years ago. There wasn’t really anything wrong with it other than it was boring and dated looking to me. Plus, I was extremely over the cheap faux cherry finish on the furniture. It sat like this until almost a year ago and by then I was beyond ready for a change!
CREATE A MOOD BOARD
Before we dive into the before and afters of the makeover, let me share the original mood board that I created. By the way – creating a mood board before you start the decorating of a room is an excellent way to put all of your thoughts and ideas into one place and get an idea of what your end design will look like.
As you take a look at the after photos of the room, it’s pretty obvious that my newly made-over room doesn’t exactly match the mood board, but it definitely has the same overall feel and that’s what was most important to me. If you’ve never created one, I put together a step-by-step tutorial that you can see right HERE.
ADD TRIM TO CREATE INTEREST
The first project of the makeover was to enhance and add interest to the architecture of the room. The bay window certainly adds interest on its own, but the huge blank wall behind the headboard needed some help. I was going for a cozy, yet uncluttered look in the room, so adding board and batten to that wall, instead of filling it with a bunch of artwork, was a great solution.
Not only does the new wall treatment add interest, it also adds lots of texture and is a nice feature that really draws your eye to this spot. To prevent warping and knot holes, we used 1″x4″ pvc boards instead of pine boards to create the wall. For reference, this wall measures 13’3″ wide x 8′ 3″ tall and each one of the openings between the boards is 22½’ wide x 21″ high.
Similar products have been linked where the original is no longer available.
UPDATE FURNITURE WITH PAINT
The next project, and the largest undertaking of all, was to paint the furniture. The furniture that we already had was in perfectly good condition, it just wasn’t to my taste any longer. So – to keep this budget-friendly, I opted to keep the dresser, mirror and nightstands and transform them with paint.
The details on the furniture made it a perfect candidate for painting solid white and then enhancing all of the lines with a dark’ish gray glaze. I used a very forgiving, easy paint technique and you can get the complete step-by-step tutorial, including a how-to video, for how I painted all of the furniture in this room HERE.
REUSE AND UPDATE A CHANDELIER
Take a look back at the before photos and you’ll get a glimpse of the ceiling fan that was original to the room. The frosted glass and ugly shiny brass embossed with grape clusters had to go! In its place, I put the chandelier that was originally located in the dining room of our home, prior to its makeover.
The chandelier started out as verdigris green with shiny brass accents, so it took a bit of scheming to come up with a new design for it that would compliment the rest of the decor in the room. You can see its before and get the full tutorial for how you can makeover a chandelier of your own HERE.
ADD THE DECORATIVE ACCENTS
After all of the diy projects had been completed it was time for the fun part – the actual decorating of the room!
My original intention was to keep all of the furniture in this room, including the bed, but as I started choosing other items for the room, I decided that the heavy, ornate headboard and footboard were just too much for the room. Remember – I was after an uncluttered look. A simple upholstered headboard is a much better fit for this space.
The headboard that I used comes with legs that can be attached, but the depth of our baseboards kept it from lying flush against the wall. To overcome that little issue, we just chose not to attach the legs. Instead, we added a D ring to each corner of the headboard on the back and hung it directly to the wall. Worked like a charm and I actually prefer this to being able to see the legs since they are covered with black fabric.
An assortment of beautiful bedding in gray and white completes the look of the bed. The gray and white striped lumbar pillows, in front of the solid gray euro shams, are actually standard size pillowcases that I cut down and sewed into a shorter size. The cases already had the button detail on them, which I loved.
When I put a bed together, I don’t hide away the actual sleeping pillows or even put them into a decorative sham. It’s too much trouble to take them out each night and replace them the next morning, so I simply “hide” them behind the other decorative pillows on the bed.
New lamps and decorative accents were added to each nightstand. A pair of Gothic arches adorned with a small wreath are the only “art” that the board and batten wall needs.
There was one more blank wall that needed attention in the room and that was the wall beside the bed, opposite from the bay window. Not only is a bench a good place to sit to put your shoes on, it also makes a great luggage rack whenever we have overnight guests. The single piece of large art is really eye-catching, but not so much that it overwhelms everything else that’s going on in the room.
All done and ready for guests!
