Master suite paint

When we painted our giant wall blue, we extended the color into the north wall of our bedroom. My thinking at the time was that it was a nice statement of unbroken blue along one whole side of the house. My thinking since then is that it's boring.

(Sidenote: we were so out of our minds during the building process and we had to make so many snap decisions, that we might be undoing some of those last-minute picks for a few years to come. See also: kitchen, Ikea.)

So our master bedroom had one colonial blue wall with a few hastily placed paintings. As we've lived in the house a years, the bedroom just felt kind of thrown together — no deliberate decisions or direction. I wanted something calming and neutral so that the new paint color could match whatever we decide to do with new bedroom furniture in the future. We agreed on spring flowers. This is the second-girliest color in the house, but it works in the space because it's a shifter. Depending on the light, it can look like a barely-there gray, or a deeper blue. It almost never looks violet/lavender, something we discovered after having the chip on the wall for a couple of weeks before painting.

Eventually, we'd like to replace the bedroom set with something in a lighter shade of wood (maybe walnut-esque), and I think it will look better than our current espresso color scheme.

I also love this style from FLOR, and am looking forward a day when we have enough disposable income to put down squares of this under a new, lighter bedroom set.

The view from the top of the stairs:

You can see just a teensy bit of the new color, but what's important is that the colonial blue ends at some point. It's a pretty modest change but one that feels good as the first step in reworking the bedroom.

Our bathroom was totally white and also needed some help. Again, we had a lot of hasty decisions that added up to a thrown-together bathroom — a crappy Ikea towel rack with crappy Ikea towel hooks, a crappy Ikea TP holder, etc. I took out all of that. Tai mudded over the nasty gouges in our wall from all that Ikea shiz, and then I painted with sidewalk gray.

Sample patch:

Final product:

It's barely different from the bedroom, and it's light enough to not interfere with putting on makeup or stumbling around blurry-eyed in the middle of the night. I also really like that it's neutral enough to accommodate pretty much whatever color scheme of towels/shower curtain that we come up with in the future, making change an easy prospect.

Paint

When we renovated our two condos, our standard m.o. was to blitz the place white and add a few accent walls of color here and there. Tai had a great color palette in his first place that pre-dated me, and we generally stuck to it — a pretty yellow, a good blue, a nice red, a pleasant green, etc. When we moved from Wasatch Towers to Center Street, we basically used the same set of colors, but just shuffled the rooms around. I felt kind of lame about this, so when it was time to build the house and pick interior colors, rather than do the same thing again, we sort of just didn't do much. 

We have a giant wall in our dining area and upstairs hallway that is a mellow shade of blue. But because our first floor is so open, we didn't really do anything else. Then, we added a new couch and a giant painting. Then, a new table came along. We filled in with a few counter stools, and all of a sudden it felt like we actually lived in the place. It's been a slow process, but it finally felt like it was time to paint. 

We have two small bedrooms and our master bedroom upstairs; all needed some attention. The first bedroom is what is informally known as the guest room. (We have had house guests exactly twice.) I saw this photo in a recent Dwell and really loved the pop of dark blue with white all around. 

With our light bamboo flooring upstairs, it seemed like a good inspiration. So this is the current state of the guest room:

I wonder if all those unhung frames are what's keeping the Dwell editors from calling. Or maybe it's the exposed box spring and lack of bed comforter? So picky. (Also, I moved my husband's rifles to be out of the frame. But, Dwell, we can always put them back in for the magazine shoot.)

Whatever. Work in progress, right? 

As it turns out, the color I ended up using in the guest room is the darkest hue on the same palette as colonial blue — something called Hudson Bay. So waspy. I love it.

Then, we had the issue of the other small bedroom. I have a hard time with this one. This room was always intended to be our nursery. We have now lost two babies and don't know if/when we'll be able to have a child. It's been in limbo before we even finished the house, and it has stayed that way for the last two years. For my own sanity, I needed to pick a color and move on with the room so that it wasn't a white box waiting for something.

This room gets strong southern sun (our first choice of color — a bright orange — made the place look like a bag of Cheetos). I wanted a warm color, but had to balance that with the retinal ZOWIE factor from afternoon sun in the winter. So I went back to a tried and true yellow called morning sunshine.

And that room is even filthier than the other one, so that's all you get to see of it until I get my act together and figure out what to do with yarn and sewing supplies. (Also, I spy the makings of yet another project there on the floor. More on that later.) Overall, though, I'm really happy with the combination of the strong indigo in the guest room and this gentle yellow in the sewing room. It feels like a nice balance on the second floor.

Next up, bedroom and bathroom color. It's an exciting life, folks.

So Tired

I haven't updated in awhile because I have been crazy busy working on the house. I am doing most of the interior finish work so since I last posted I have spent more hours than I can count finishing the and grouting tile, installing the bamboo floor, putting up base board, installing cabinets etc etc etc... My dad has been great, putting in many late nights with me and my brothers in law were really helpful getting a lot of the bamboo down two Saturdays ago.

The metal siding is almost done outside, most of our exterior concrete is in and most of the final grading has been done as well. We are really closing in on this.

Here are a bunch of photos that I'm too tired to narrate, so hopefully they tell the story pretty well on their own.

Vaulted space

We are tentatively expanding the vaulted space in the living room (far right of the floor plan here, the part with the "x" through it). It had been a bit pinched with all the design tweaking we did to the second floor.


If you have sharp eyes and a good memory, you'll notice a very slight shift in the placement of the second floor over the first. We're moving it to the west to create a little more vaulted space in the living room. The second-floor jog at the loft (top of the stairs) is what will require one of the structural beams in the house (it's also where we're talking about whether that beam will be exposed).

You can also see the orientation of the master bath, including a re-orientation of the toilet room, and the shower-only stall at the south (or "bottom") of the master bathroom. This particular orientation would not accommodate a double-sided linen closet, but it does reclaim a foot or so of space that we desperately needed for the second bathroom to be truly comfortable and functional. And the door for the master bedroom can be at any point along that approach hallway — as per a commentor's suggestion, we will likely put it at the public-space-end of the hall.

The master bedroom mash-up

After looking at the different bedroom options, we realized that a great solution was probably going to take a bit of mix-n-match. We're not totally sure that what we want to do will actually work, but the design process has involved some dreaming for us, so why not a bit more?

This is what we'd like the master bedroom to look like — we pulled elements from three different sketches to get to this option.


If you can't read our scribbles, then the bedroom portion is from Option 3, our preferred toilet-linen combination is from Option 2, and the rest of the bathroom is from Option 4. We're not quite sure that our preferred drawing will work, hence the (2), with a slightly smaller linen closet and re-oriented toilet room.

Also, kudos to Lisa for her two-sided linen closet idea. We will henceforth call it "The Lisa." (Other naming opportunities still abound.)

Master bedroom layout

We've been working on laying out the master bedroom and bathroom. As it turns out, making a closet, toilet room, double vanity, shower/tub and linen closet into an 18'-by-18' grid is a bit tough. This was the first go at it:

We wanted to redesign this version because 1) we forgot a linen closet, 2) we needed a bit more living space in the bedroom part itself, and 3) it turns out that I really don't want a walk-in closet, even though I said I did. Ever the indulgent ones, Matt and Kenner sent over a few other options.

Option 1:
Option 2:
Option 3:
Option 4:
Option 5:
In each drawing, north is "up," and the rest of the second floor is to the right of the drawing (you can see the entrance to the master suite in the same location on each drawing). We're still working on the drawings, but in the meantime, which would you choose if it were your bedroom?