the $25 bedroom...

...or how to remodel while unemployed.

Sometimes I wonder if people are thinking ill of me for fixing up the house when Beorn doesn't have a job. It doesn't seem very responsible. But the truth of it is - we're spending next to no money, so we really can afford it.

Beorn and I have been contemplating what to do with our room for a long time. I heard, once upon a time, that you should let the man decorate the bedroom, so I tried to let Beorn make the final decision on what we did. I like two styles of bedroom: the light, bright, white-on-white kind and the dark, cozy kind. He wanted dark... So here it is - my new bedroom that we spent just $25 on:

Ok, technically is was a little bit more, since we used the Home Depot gift card my dad gave me for my birthday, as well as stuff we already had. But it was just $25 out of pocket.

I textured the ceiling (using the tail end of the topping box we bought when we moved in last year). Then we tacked up some wood trim, backwards, to add architectural interest and hide the painted over wall paper seams ($20, from the restore).


Beorn painted the ceiling (our big bucket of ceiling paint, from when we moved in, ran out before we finished, so that gift card came in handy). I don't know if you can see just how pink those walls were...

I painted the ceiling fan (leftover paint) and Beorn put it back together without the light fixture.

Then we painted the walls a nice dark gray brown ($5, paint from the restore plus some of that free paint from work).


And now here it is, in all its before-and-after glory:



Before:
(Pale pink walls, brown carpet, old ceiling fan... the only thing we liked was the vintage light fixture. And notice the green door? We didn't want a backdoor off the master bedroom, so Beorn took that out last summer and replaced it with a window from the boneyard at Jones Paint and Glass. The carpet also came out - we much prefer the original hardwood floor that was underneath.)
And After:

Beorn made the bed from some the paneled doors we took out of the kitchen and a homemade bed some neighbors left behind when they moved (free), the curtains over the bed were left from Monkey's room in the old house, the curtain rods for the windows I picked up a while ago for $2/each at DI, I made the curtains from fabric from my stash and the red fabric on the bed, in lieu of a new duvet? I picked it up for free, years ago, off the side of the road (literally!).




I guess this is now a $35 room. We bought an old chair from the want-ads for $10. It will make a little sitting area by the other window. It's not much to look at right now...

...just wait until I get it recovered. It'll be a bit of a patchwork chair, since I'm going to recover it in fabrics I have on hand, but it will be beautiful...

and here it is... four fabrics later... the cats have already claimed it as theirs.