Bedroom Blues (Or Purples)
/I'm starting a new series where I pick apart every room in my house and tell you what I hate about it. Just kidding. But I will be doing a little collection here where tackle each room, photograph it for your viewing pleasure and tell you how it could improve by investing several thousand dollars into each space. You know, just in case you're curious. Or want to donate.
So let's talk about bedrooms for a little bit.
Mine is boring. But I put it on the internet for you to set your googly eyes upon regardless.
It does have some good bones and some great furniture to work with, but its definitely lacking in a lot of areas - sorta like my bank account. And by all of that I mean there is one giant blank wall with no furniture, art, or love.
I always feel like the bedroom should be the one place that shouldn't be too fussy or overdone. I'm usually running around like four-year-old that sucked down a foot-long pixie stick, so having my bedroom be the one calm, relaxing place in my house does wonders for my ability to actually sleep. If there's too much going on at one time - too many pillows to fluff, furniture to rearrange, plants to not kill - I get too overwhelmed and back myself up into a corner and cry until I reorganize the order of my strict to-do list between sobbing heaves until I'm finally okay again. It really takes a lot of time out of your day, you know? Time I frankly just don't have.
But in all honesty, I really do rearrange/edit things all the time. And because my bedroom is not entirely the way I want it, it causes the most extreme unnecessary case of anxiety. Its completely ridiculous, because you're not supposed to (nor should you) just buy things all at once to fill a wall or space. I fully believe that what you own should be considered a collection of things you love, rather than a frantic assortment of accessories you just piled in your cart at Homegoods after you've had a few glasses of wine during an episode of Property Brothers.... not that I can speak from experience there or anything...
But I can't help it. I want to buy all the things and make my bedroom full and finished - but not fussy! Because, you know, corners and crying and stuff.
This is it in all of its purple glory:
To be honest, I don't even really like purple all that much. I don't know why I painted my room this color. It was pretty much chosen on a whim: a more scientific version of close your eyes and pick a paint chip, but just barely.
The bed was a steal from Joss & Main ($200 for a full sized frame!!), but the rest of the furniture I've either inherited (shout out to my grandparents for having marble Knoll side tables!) or shoddily built myself, courtesy of IKEA. The curtains, if you remember, were also a gift from my grandmother, in which she graciously stripped them from her dining room and shipped them to me. True love.
Those bedside tobacco leaf lamps are my favorite part of the room - another recent gift from Mimi. But one of them doesn't work and until I take it to the lamp shop to get the wiring redone, I cry myself to sleep every night. Its all very dramatic. You would cry too if you had a non-functional tobacco leaf lamp.
This is also where you're supposed to ooh and ahh about how I drink my distilled water from stemless wine glasses and wear my Warby Parker readers before bed. Because I'm chic like that.
So based on what I currently have, here's what I need to add:
FLOOR LAMP
I really need a floor lamp in the corner by my wingback chair. I want to create a little vignette so when I'm giving tours of my home I can casually say, "Oh this is just my reading nook", which is code for everyone else: this is where she curls up with a cup of Earl Grey, all sophisticated-like, and throws herself into many serious biographies of very seriously important people. Because only people who make it in life have reading nooks, and guys, I want to make it. But really, I just need a floor lamp for two other (and more boring) reasons:
- To add some height to the room. Every piece of furniture I have in there is really low and basically all one height. I guess that happens when you're 5'2 and you're installing/decorating everything yourself. Having a bed that you don't need a step-stool to get in to is a huge bragging right so this is a luxury in my life right now that I know will not last forever.
- To add a balance of light. I hate ceiling fan light kits with a passion. It totally washes out the room and gives it this weird, yellow glow: like the wrong shade of powder you wore in middle school when just the fact you were wearing makeup at all made you cool. Having the right wattage bulb in lamps (table or floor) is like finally finding the right shade of foundation - which for me, sadly, I was just able to master a few months ago. But bulb wattage? Shoot, I've had that locked down for years.
I've tried playing around with the corner, attempting to make it not so sad before the giant Lola Donoghue print gets back from the framers and fills most of the blank wall. But I eventually just gave up and let it be miserable. Its healthy to suffer a little bit, right?
I also want something with a little visual interest but without too modern/harsh because this is the softest and most delicate room in the house - like my temperament. I want something brassy/gold to add some brightness, but I'm also like, "what if brass looks so outdated in like a year?" Brass is EVERYWHERE right now and its teetering on the edge of becoming too trendy. Brass, please don't become the next accent wall, ok? That would be great, thanks.
I think I'm going to have to go with something like the Olympia floor lamp, pictured above. But obviously not that floor lamp because a quarter of a grand on a lamp is just stupid and makes me mad. Mad that I can't afford it.
CREDENZA
This is my favorite word to say.
CRE-DEN-ZA
Has a little zing to it, yes? I need a little more credenza in my life. Specifically in my bedroom, against that lonely, empty wall. It needs a friend. "Boring Wall? Meet Credenza, your new girlfriend. You two will fall in love and live happily together forever and ever, amen."
But it's like, which one do I choose? Do I do white lacquered? Or wood? Or brass? ALL THREE? Did you read that in a yelling voice in your head just then? That's how I always think about sticky situations like these - in all caps, yelling inside my brain.
This is where I'm truly stumped and I'm sure the only way I'll come to a decision is based on price. The first image is actually an IKEA hack, where they just put tapered furniture legs on some kitchen cabinets. Part of me is like, "Oh, I can do that! That's thrifty and customizable and I'll look at it every night before I go to bed and feel so proud that I made something without stick-figure instruction packets." And the other part is like, "LOL. That's funny that you think you can do that." But really, when I think about having to build a cabinet and then put legs on them by myself, I think about math, and then math makes me think about sadness and death.
So ideally, I'm going to buy the lacquered West Elm version with the steel legs that will play off of my Knoll side tables. It's $500, but at least I won't think about sadness and death and failure at mathematics when I look at it.
DECOR
This is something that I mostly have covered, but needs some help. I was in this frantic and frenzied mode one weekend after I moved in a just threw all my existing art up on the walls just to get them out of my sight and pretend that I had accomplished something. (Mostly just to mark something off my three page to-do list because, oooh that feels so good!) But now I have a new to-do task: "fix bad art hanging job".
I need to re-style this whole shebang, because that current watercolor is just about as long as the dresser and so it looks like I only thought about the 36" width that the dresser occupied - like a stripe of decor on my wall. "That's it wall! That's all you get!" Also, those gold mercury glass vases/decanters/decorative things that don't have a purpose? Yeah, those are definitely post-wine-Homegoods-trip victims.
Also, I have a glowing salt rock. It is supposedly an air purifier and clears your auras and makes you a better person, or something. But I just bought it because it was a glowing salt rock. And I can cup my hands around it and pretend to predict your fate like a fortune teller. You know, grown up, adult-like things.
Also, my bedside tables are currently looking too-functional. I know that sounds crazy, and technically it is, but no one needs to see that I'm reading Gone Girl and George Bush's memoir at the same time. That's just going to open up the floor for a whole lot of weird and unnecessary questions. Since these Knoll tables don't have any storage, I need to find a better solution to hide my guilty reading habits and my I'm-too-lazy-to-take-my-earrings-off-before-bed jewelry dish.
So now you've seen my boring bedroom and probably think that I have no taste and will never read this blog again and I'll retreat back to my corner and cry some more. But hang in there! Don't pull a Jack and let go of my hand on the raft in the middle of the Atlantic and fade away into darkness! (And just for the record, I'm totally not as rude as Rose and I would have made room for you on the raft. You KNOW that it was big enough for two....). This bedroom will be saved, and so will your faith in me. Unless you're totally freaked out that I'm reading Gone Girl and George Bush's memoir at the same time, and then, well, goodbye, I guess.