I’m feeling a lot better and dove head-first into a new project.  As part of the Cozy Minimalist course with the Nester that I’m taking, I had to choose a room for my project.  I got that assignment while laying on my bed in this:

And I thought, “This is the room I hate most in my house.”  I thought this room was off limits, because to do anything in here I needed to move our doorway first.  Why paint when you’re going to redo the drywall, right?  Then I thought I’d better scrape down the popcorn ceiling and get a drywall guy over here to skim coat it so that the mess of that didn’t ruin my newly painted walls, but that was going to cost $$$.  And then we needed our plumbing fixed so we could put up the walls that will be there forever….which would be about $9,000, and 5 years of saving.  So I sat in this horrible space in my own mess and felt sorry for myself.

Then I thought, why not?  This has to get better or I’m going to go crazy. If nothing else I could clean.  So I picked my bedroom as my project room.  Our first official assignment was to quiet the room.

It only took me a couple of hours.  Seriously?  What was I waiting for?

With the walls all cleared off like that, I thought about painting.  It wouldn’t be too much trouble, really.  And if I have to wait 5 years on all that other stuff, why not? I used the leftover paint from my son’s room.

After the walls were done, we ripped out the carpet and painted the trim too.  I mean, at this point it was super easy to do it with hardly any furniture in there and all. While I was waiting for the trim coats to dry, I  decided to paint my nightstand.  It’s the same paint….and the brush was already wet.

I left the top the original finish and used gold leaf rub and buff to brighten up the drawer pulls.

I’ve been tired of my footboard for awhile, so Darren found a set of bed rails in the basement and switched our bed to that.  Our headboard will still work with this system.  I have plans to update the headboard a bit, and now it makes sense to get a bench at the foot of the bed for putting on shoes and storing extra bedding.  I’ll also need to make a bed skirt.

Then, the room looked so good, I went to work on that horrible sub floor. There were chunks out of it, staples everywhere and bits of the carpet pad had adhered to it.  It looked like camo flocking.  I did my best with a paint scraper, pliers, wall spackle to fill in  the missing chunks, and then painted it.  I could load up the roller with paint and fill in all the little holes and cracks since gravity wouldn’t make drips on the floor like it would on walls.

While I was running my errands I slipped into Old Time Pottery just to see how much mirrors would be.  I’d like to hang some over our newly painted nightstands, to bounce around light.  They had these gorgeous mirrors, but the frames were scratched up.  On a whim I went to customer service and asked if they gave discounts on damaged merchandise and they gave me 25% off on the spot.

We’ve wanted to get rid of the ceiling fan for 3 years and this seemed like a good time to shop for one.  I found this blog post with ideas.  It was several years old, but #3 caught my eye.  When I clicked over it was on sale 50% off with free shipping and free returns.  Sold.

I like to put rugs down when I paint sub floor, but my budget for this project is super tight.  After buying the light and the mirrors, I was feeling a touch of buyers guilt. I checked rugsusa.com, but even with the 75% off sale I couldn’t make a decision. Then I checked craigslist and found a 9×12 jute rug for half of the lowest price I could find anywhere online.

We are planning a garage sale next week and I hope to raise the cash to buy the rest of the items from the mood board above (I’m basically going to give my life savings to Ikea.)  If you don’t hear from me for awhile, I’m cleaning out my garage.  If you thought the before picture of my bedroom was bad…..the garage is much, much worse.