Extreme Bedroom Makeover

Ok, I don't know how "extreme" it was, but our bedroom did get a face lift this weekend. It happened just in time I'd say, since football season is in full swing now and we can never come to an agreement with what should be on the tv. I mentioned in my last post that we were going to make some changes in our bedroom, but I didn't know how much I would actually love it. I hardly want to leave the room now!

Here are a couple "before" shots of our bedroom:

When I planned the room, I knew I wanted to use this gold colored slip cover on the love seat and paint this wall white for juxtaposition. We wanted to place the tv so that we could watch from bed, but it made it impossible to watch tv from the love seat. At the time I was really opposed to puting the love seat in the middle of the room because I thought it would take up too much space. Since I had gone to the trouble of painting the wall white so that the love seat would look good there, I did not want to move it.

Fast forward a year. After living in the house for 12 months and getting a better feel for the space, we started to think we needed more "liveable" space. I love that we had a big formal living/ dining room because it's come in handy several times when entertaining BUT on a daily basis, it's not really liveable space for us. I really like that we have guest rooms (someday kids rooms, but don't read too much into that, especially you Mom) since we have family and friends coming to town all the time, but again not really practical space for our everyday lives. We started to think it would be nice to have another "living area where we could watch tv, read, etc. so we decided it was time to tweak the layout our room.

So here is what we did:

• moved the loveseat off the wall and into the middle of the room
• ditched the coffee table and got a storage ottoman that can double as a coffee table
• hung a 32" flat screen tv on the wall
• moved the bookshelf that used to support the old tv
• changed around a few other decorations, mirror, pictures, etc.

Hanging the tv was quite an adventure since it seemed like our wall had no studs! We were really baffled for about an hour as to how our wall was actually standing since we could not find a stud anywhere. We were using a studfinder but turns out, those things can be a little misleading sometimes. Eventually we resorted to the old hammer and nail method, which you would think would have helped us find the stud....

... about 20 holes later, we found it! Good thing we have plenty of spackle and left over paint! We'll be needing to do a lot of touch up before we move out someday! For now, the tv is covering all these holes.

So here are the pictures of our new improved room, one taken from every corner of the room!

And a few close ups of the new and improved sitting area:

I am really loving the new layout and am not bothered at all by the love seat being in the middle of the room. There is still plenty of space between the foot of the bed and the back of the loveseat to walk through. When we first looked at the house I remember loving how big the master bedroom was but having no idea how we would use all the space. I think we've finally figured it out! Here is my view from bed now:

Another exciting change that won't be in full effect until Friday is we signed up for AT&T U-verse and are ditching our old Time Warner Cable. If you haven't heard of it or don't live in a place where it's available, it's AT&T's cable, internet and phone service that they offer. The cable service has a lot of cool features that are not available with Time Warner Cable. For example, we will be able to play back DVRd shows on any tv in the house. That means that Andrew can be watching football downstairs and I can be watching last week's episode of What Not to Wear on the DVR upstairs. Even guests who are staying in the guest room can watch shows from the DVR on the tv in there. We can also record 4 shows at one time on the DVR, which won't always be necessary, but will be handy on Thursdays when it seems like EVERY show we like to watch comes on tv. There are other cool features like setting the DVR from my iPhone, NFL network comes standard, $100 cash back, and free installation! All in all, we will pay 5 dollars more a month than we paid with Time Warner, but it definitely seems worth it. Also for the first 6 months we get $30 off the cost. The installation will take place on Friday and I seriously can't wait.

We have plans over the next month or so to really finish our master bathroom that has kind of been hanging in limbo for a while. After we did the tiling we never finished the baseboards and have lived with it that way for a year. We also haven't been that thrilled with the paint in there, partially because we don't love the color in there and partially because I did a really crappy paint job. We also want to install new faucets and put some hardware on the cabinets and drawers like we did in the guest bathroom. None of these things are too time consuming so if we pace ourselves over a few weekends, we could easily have the bathroom done in a month or so. We took a long break from house projects over the spring and summer and now I feel refreshed and ready to take on a few more things. There are a lot of little projects that we just need to wrap up and get out of the way. I'll update about the bathroom as we go.

I need to blog a little bit about my trip to Cheyenne to visit Mel as well as the arrival of Baby Adley, our friend's Jaime and George's little girl. Those posts will come soon so check back. For now I'm headed upstairs to enjoy my new tv!