29th Avenue: A Dark Master Bedroom Gets a Colorful Makeover – Part I

this idea

We bought the 29th Avenue house at the end of 2013 and have been slowly giving this 1920s bungalow a facelift, room by room: first the bathroom, then the office, and now the master bedroom! The previous owners had painted every room in, apparently, the darkest colors they could find. Considering our home has tiny rooms, even smaller windows, and we live in Cloud City, USA aka Portland, the dark and dismal vibes just weren’t going to cut it. So, “Operation Cheer Up” was born.    

The master bedroom is the next room on the list to get a cheery makeover and I’m super, super happy with how it turned out. Before the reveal tomorrow, let’s see where this room began, shall we?

Um… so, yeah. This is the before. Pretty awesome, right? And by awesome I mean awful. Bile-colored walls, broken IKEA blinds, the world’s ugliest fan, and THAT BED.

Let’s talk about that bed for a second. It looks fine in these photos, sure, but it’s actually totally busted. The slats had broken years before and our mattress was just sitting on the ground. The frame itself was essentially a glorified box — just there for decorative purposes, with no actual function.

Oh, and speaking of mattresses, before our makeover, we’d been sleeping on a 10-year-old “memory foam” mattress we got from an online discount store when we first got married. I don’t know that it was really memory foam (I highly doubt it), but it was the most uncomfortable mattress on the planet. Period. It was definitely time for an upgrade after a decade of terrible sleep! Needless to say, we were SUPER STOKED to team up with YogaBed to test run their new luxury foam mattress. Words cannot even express the difference! Gah! Seriously. But more on that tomorrow.

Other than a new bed situation and paint color, this room desperately needed some cozy accessories (a rug would be a good place to start), some actual lamps, blinds that weren’t all janky, and a fan that didn’t look like a piece of whirling poop on our ceiling. Y’know, the small things. Enter LampsPlus, Blinds.com, Target, and Loloi Rugs.

Just for fun, and because I thrive on visual references, I pulled a few images that help depict the overall vibes we’re going for with this makeover. Vibes like this:

OoOooh!

And this:

Ahhh!

And this:

SWEET.

Curious how this is all going to come together? Check out the 29th Avenue bedroom makeover Pinterest board! But first, here’s a little mood board to whet your appetite:

Oh heck yes. Color! Plants! Cozy things! Ponder on that for a minute then check back tomorrow for the big reveal.

Disclosure: YogaBed, LampsPlus, Blinds.com, Loloi Rugs, and Target provided products for this makeover. All views and opinions are mine alone.