A long, long, time ago, we moved into this house (OK, four and a half years ago). And when we did, we knew from the start that we wanted to fix up the master bedroom. It had been converted from garage space into living space, but it hadn't been done very well. There was no closet. The floor was covered with cheap tiles, stuck directly to the uneven cement that had previously been the garage floor. And the whole thing was grey.

But here's the thing about the master bedroom: most of the time, nobody sees it except the couple who lives there. When you invite guests into your home, you hang out in the living room or the dining room or the kitchen or the back yard. Kids play in kids' rooms. Everyone uses the guest bath. But visiting the master bedroom usually isn't part of the equation, unless the hosts are specifically giving a tour of the home.

I'm sure that if the floor of my living room had holes in it and was peeling up and sticking to everything, we would have gotten that swapped out immediately. You don't want to have people come over and walk on the dirty concrete visible through the holes in your floor. But when it's only yourself being inconvenienced? You find you can live with that for awhile. I can, anyway. And so we ignored it and hated it and finally saved up the money and carved out the time and FIXED IT.

Starting a year ago, we (by we, I mostly mean my husband--though I did do most of the painting) completely transformed our bedroom into something ugly that I was ashamed of into something beautiful that I love.

Now, if this happened a year ago, why am I just sharing about it now, you ask?

Because, just as with getting the project going in the first place, it's taken me that long to FINISH the job. All the major work happened last year, but I just had one last thing to do--just one tiny little bit--get around to re-finishing the dresser. And it took me a year to get it done, but I finally did, and so now I can reveal my bedroom in all its new prettiness.

Sadly, I have virtually no "before" pictures. I think this is because the bedroom looked so bad that I didn't even want to take pictures in there at all, ever. The closest thing I can find is this:


Yes, this photo of the evil unicorn. This shows you a bit of how the dresser looked before: white, chipped, and faded.  You can also see a bit of our old bedspread in the reflection, and the color of the walls.


And then there's this--taken just as we were starting to get to work. See those holes in the floor? They weren't because we'd starting ripping up the tiles. They were just there, because the tiles were crappy and started peeling up almost as soon as we moved in. The closet had been built, at this point--you can see the closet wall in the left-hand side. Before that we kept all of our hanging clothes in the closet in the office and had to walk across the house to get them.



Now work is really getting going--here's Beth helping pick up the old tiles.


And Eric spreading leveling compound on the floor so that our new flooring would actually lay flat.


Here's the lovely new color we picked. I don't remember the name of it, but it's such a pretty blue. There's nothing really wrong with gray--I think it can look kind of sophisticated. But the gray walls and gray floor and everything just made it all look so blah. I like color!



Here's Eric laying the first row of flooring! So exciting. We choose bamboo flooring. Partly because it is beautiful, and less expensive and easier to install compared to hardwood. And partly because we had two different friends who both had done bamboo in their homes, and both had remnants left over they were willing to let us have. We bought the remainder of what we needed.




I had intended to have this pictures posted in order, as though you were coming in the door and slowly turning in a circle. But Blogger didn't upload them that way, and I certainly don't want to go back and re-do it. So here's our bed, and the east wall. The bed is from craigslist, bedspread for Kohl's, nightstand from Ikea, lamp from a garage sale. Curtain fabric from Ikea. Blue wool throw on the end of my bed was a Christmas gift to me from my parents the year before I left for college. I took it to Linfield with me and slept under it every night. The picture above the bed you can't really see, but there's a quote superimposed on the picture by photographer Shaun Sundholm. It says "Let's find some beautiful place to get lost. You can see a bigger picture of it here.


Little overflow bookshelf from Target. It holds some of the books that won't fit on the big bookshelves in the living room; mainly old college textbooks we couldn't part with. The picture of the loon we bought at a gallery in Missoula when we visited Meg in Montana last year; the jar with corks from wine bottles we've been working on filling up for several years now :)


I know this one is blurry, but I didn't want to go back and re-take it. This is the corner closet Eric built. I think I'd like a door to go in front of it or a curtain or something though. Alas, is any project ever really finished?



This is the east-facing wall again, with a door to the outside. And, you get your first glimpse of the thing that took me so long to complete--the dresser!


And here it finally is. The dresser was originally from my mother-in-law, and it bore the marks having been used by a busy family for many years. But I loved the curvy lines and funky look it had, and I knew I wanted to fix it up. When I told Eric I wanted it to be yellow he said, "Yellow?" But I knew I wanted yellow. I like bright colors. I had to strip all the old white paint/shellac off, and sand it, and re-paint it twice, and take all the handles off, and strip them, and replace the round ones in the middle because some of them were missing. I told Eric originally that I thought it would take me a day or two. It took me a year. But I stick to my statement--if I ever had taken a day or two and done *nothing* but work on the dresser all day, I could have gotten it done. I'm sure I'm right.