Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Next Before-And-After: The Canopy Bedroom!

I know! Can you believe there are still more rooms to look at? Imagine how we felt when we were tackling this beast. One room after another, after another. And there's still plenty of work left to do, make no mistake. We'll probably still be renovating this house until Jules leaves for college, and he'll look back fondly on this time as the "twenty years that my parents neglected me while they slowly fixed up our country house..."

Okay. Enough woe-is-me talk, let's get down to business. The next room on the docket: The Canopy Bedroom.

Of all the rooms in our farmhouse, this bedroom gets the most spectacular morning light. If I had my way, we'd be sleeping in here, but sadly, once we realized there were only radiators in two of the bedrooms, it seemed like the natural choice to sleep in one of those instead, so we weren't needlessly heating a room with nobody in it... Alas. Practicality can be a downer.

before


It started out like this-- another room clad in wonderfully romantic, tragically molting wallpaper with beautiful dogwood flowers and branches woven up and down the walls. Truly a beauty of a bygone era... I really put up a fight in this room, but eventually I resigned myself to removing the wallpaper and we installed new drywall and a terrific school house light fixture (which originally hung over our dining room table in the Sparrowbush cottage) and then, in a major low-budget victory, I found a sensational antique canopy bed for $75.00 on Craig's List! This bed pretty much makes the room, so it goes without saying that I'm pretty pleased with it.


I confess, I don't even remember what I was searching for when I found this beautiful canopy bed, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't looking for a canopy bed. Craig's List can be like that-- it's a little "down the worm hole" as John likes to say-- one minute you're looking for one thing, which then leads to something else, and then you're like, "Actually maybe I do need a ---- " and before you know it, you find yourself in a volkswagen with a pitbull, a two year old, and a mildly annoyed husband, en route to Connecticut, and you're like, "How did I get here again???" If you find yourself in this situation, I recommend politely apologizing to your family and then staying the course, because in the end, you come out with a $75.00 antique canopy bed!
after




And ta-da! Now it looks like this! The walls are painted Benjamin Moore's Healing Aloe #1562 (I know. I'm a broken record) and it's pretty darn cute. We've still got a couple more projects in the works for this room-- I just picked up this fantastic pair of antique brass goose-neck/swing-arm sconces and John has promised me that we'll get them installed over the next couple of weekends.

Then there is also my on-going to desire to wallpaper this room, but I think we're still a fair ways from doing that, because wallpaper is just too freaking expensive. I'm bummed out actually. I have fantasies of wallpapering the staircase, the downstair's bathroom, and this bedroom, but all of those lofty plans are on hold until I win the lottery or earn a lot more money. I guess that's how the cookie crumbles... If you spend four months in France, don't be surprised if you don't have enough money for wallpaper when you get back. C'est la vie!

I'll just cross my fingers for the lottery in the meantime. 

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