Plan, plan, plan

 I have put a lot of effort into making the main living spaces of our homes look nice and feel cozy since we bought our first home in 2006.  This was done for obvious reasons: everyone that visits spends time in the main living spaces. 

 

My Aunt Janis is an interior designer.  She ran a very successful business until she semi-retired a few years ago.  Aunt Janis helped me to pick my design colors when we first moved in and gave me the advice to stick to the color board whenever buying something new.  I have always done that and the result is a home that flows from one room to the next.  I can take a piece of art from any room in the house and move it and it will work.

 

I had just gotten to the point where the formal living room and dining room in our old house were feeling complete.  And then we moved.

 

Everything came with us though, so setting up a new living and dining room wasn't difficult.

 

Our master bedroom in our old house was pretty.  Not perfect, but I certainly wasn't embarassed by it.  We painted it a beautiful color and we had nice bedding. I just can't seem to find a single picture of it right now.  Total fail.

 

One room of our rental house that I have totally neglected is the master bedroom.

 

These pictures are from January 2011.  The room looks nothing like this now.  It doesn't matter though, because what it looks like isn't great. 

 

My latest obsession is in planning our new master bedroom.  We close on the house tomorrow and then we will get the keys on Wednesday.  Then we can start doing whatever we want.

 

The husband of a friend of mine paints as a part time job.  He's painting all of the main living areas and the master bedroom for us.  All of the main living areas will be this color:

(Bradstreet Beige- we used it in our previous house too)

 

I really want to do something different in the master bedroom though.

 

This is the new bed that we got.  I got off-white sheers to hang from the canopy.

 

 This is our new bedding.  The guy at Bed, Bath and Beyond had to get a 414 foot tall ladder to get it off the very top shelf of the store. 



 

I bought this painting (and by painting, I mean cheap print from Kirkland's) to go on the wall behind the bed. It is ginormous, yet it weighs like 2 ounces.  That's how cheap it is.

I bought this "painting" (again, cheapy cheap from Kirkland's) to go somewhere else in the master bedroom.

 

This is our actual bedding. It weighs about as much as a pygmy hippopotamus.

 

This is the actual print.

 

And this is the other actual print.

 

This is the color we're thinking of doing behind the bed.  It's called Dinner Party.

 

This is what it looks like in a real room.

 

I'm stuck on what color to do on the other walls.

 

A goldy neutral like Goldtone?

 

A darker tan like Saddle Tan? 

Or a taupey brown like Taupetone?

 

I want the room to look rich and saturated.  Red can go clownish pretty easily, but the wall behind the bed has two windows (one on either side of the bed) that we will cover with drapes.   That, along with the huge picture in the middle and the bed itself will limit the amount of red that is actually in there. 

 

Luckily my aunt will be in town this weekend so we can get everything figured out so it can be painted next week.  I am putting far too much energy into all of this.   It will be nice when some decisions are made and everything is done so I can just, you know, GO TO SLEEP IN MY NEW BEDROOM.  That will hopefully not look like a red and yellow McDonald's.