Purple Bedroom Majesty

Just two weeks of steady work and the master bedroom is almost totally redone!   I've been so busy with that project, that I haven't yet taken the last few photos to show you what we've done with the living- and dining rooms since I last posted. Anyway, let's start with a couple of before photos.

Our temporary set up:

Looking back, it's so sad.  I don't think it felt quite this sad in person, but...

 

What we already had:

Furniture (bed, bedside "tables," dressers, couch)

Down comforter, pillows, bed clothes

Wall paint: Benjamin Moore Autumn Purple (2 gallons)

Curtain panels: Ikea, to go with the purple paint

Some materials & tools to deal with the beam and chandelier

Chandelier

What we bought:

Materials to make a new duvet set

Ceiling paint: Pittsburgh Paint Moth Gray

Some materials to deal with the beam

Dimmer switch and accommodating plate

Done-for-now:

I don't have the skills and perhaps the camera to capture it.  It's not so dark as this, but also not super bright which we both like.

The less decorated end as viewed from the right-side of the bed.

There were a few challenges.  Initially, I wanted to go with purple and grey, but we discovered we could get Betty to sleep on a sofa at the end of the bed rather than the bed and that sofa is an Ikea number that we have two (2) brown slipcovers for already.  They only make that one in green, brown and I think white.  I got lucky and found a few purple and brown decorator fabrics at the JoAnn in Missoula (we've limited options here) and the one we both liked had purple, brown AND grey.  YEY!  So, I took my 40% off coupon down there and bought 9 yard of that stuff.  Bonus: it was made in the USA.

A close up with the requisite seam to make 54" material into a king-sized duvet.  It took a few trips to a few shops to find a grey to make the bias strip trim piece out of.

The duvet: six yards of Waverly print, half a yard of woven cotton turned into 280+ inches of bias strip, and one king flat sheet (for the back). The shams are another couple of yards of Waverly print, more bias strip, and a king pillow case to back them.

After the paint was up and a few days dry on the walls and ceiling I went to work on making that drywall covered beam into a feature rather than a drawback.  I had made a sample hoping to get a close match for the exposed, rough-sawn beam in the living room.  I just made up the technique based on my years decorative painting [buffs fingernails on shirt]!

You can see that I extended the fuax bois onto the adjacent wall thinking that would look more like an exposed beam feature.

So beam-y.

Between each of the 10 layers on the beam, I would work on painting the chandelier.  I neglected to take before photos; it seems to have been rattle-can painted with an aluminum paint.  I cleaned, sanded, primed, painted, painted, painted it.  When that was dry, I reattached the crystals, bought 40-watt bulbs and hung that sucker (which took 3, or was it 4? trips to the hardware store).

Now it's all coppery!  The inside surface of our bedside shelves are copper, too.  Special thanks to Paul and Leigh for passing on their cast-off chandelier!  I'm glad I never got it installed in Portland so we could have it here.

The wood of our doors is coppery, too, so I went ahead and copper-leafed the switch plates.  If there is one thing I don't go for it's blaring white rectangles messing up my wall finishes.  I just painted the outlet covers purple, but thought I'd have a little steampunk-y fun with the switch plates. 

What is this strange, archaic portal?  The round phone jack begged for the copper treatment.  The rest of the phone jacks I've encountered while painting have been covered with blank plates since we don't have a land line.

This is the only outlet I did in the copper leaf and glaze treatment.  It's also the only plate with the cool, space-age design.  It goes in the as-yet-unfinished master half-bath where the outlet is up at sink height.

After alllllll the painting came curtains.  I had the double rod from my old place on 80th Ave. and hung it at ceiling height, like I am wont to do most of the time.   Luckily, I hadn't hemmed these panels in Portland, so I could do so for this window.  I had rescued some black-out curtain material a couple of years ago and re-cut that and was able to use the inside rod to hang them behind the purple panels.

They're Ikea panels, so they're an imitation of some fancier material, not dupioni but similarly "streaked" and textured.

When we visited last August to shop for houses we noticed how much later it stays light here than in Portland.  Amazing what a difference a few degrees of latitude can make!

What is left to do:

Cover or get new "candle socket covers" for the chandelier.  If I can find a paper I like, I'll cover the old ones which are an odd size (3.5" rather than 2", 4" or 6").

Repaint this mirror frame for over my dresser.  Maybe a copper, maybe something else. 

Make new covers for the pillows that go on "Betty's couch" and get or make a new, color-coordinated blanket.  Betty is like a parrot and sleeps best when totally covered.

Find art or "art" for these walls; maybe something from our stash, maybe new pieces either made or bought, or maybe a combination.  Art is something that comes in its own time in my experience

Also, I'd really like a tall-ish headboard.  I feel like we almost have a real grown-up bedroom and the headboard would finish that impression.  So, I'm looking at headboards I can refinish and things I could make into a headboard on craigslist, etc.  No luck so far.  By the way, there ought to be some regulations or at least guidelines about what can or should be called "beautiful" on a craigslist post.

The panorama just looked too weird to really show anything, but it also looked to weird not to share.