Room makeover, a before & after: Creating a bedroom retreat

The Day of New London, Conn,'s Spaces magazine today featured a story about how I re-design a room by using furniture, artwork and accessories that a homeowner already owns. The magazine used this bedroom that I re-designed as an example and I thought I'd post a few of the photos that I took because I think they illustrate solutions for some pretty typical problems.

In the "before," it's clear there wasn't much color in the room. It looks like the homeowners just moved in, doesn't it? In fact, the very nice couple who owns this home had been there for quite some time.

A few other problems: There's no headboard, so the bed wasn't featured as well as it could have been. And the bed isn't facing the entrance to the bedroom, which is usually the best spot for making a bed the room's focal point.

In the "after," you can see that I infused color by swiping pillows, plants, frames and vases from here and there around the house. And, most importantly, the print over the bed - which you couldn't really see so well in the hallway where it previously had been - adds a lot of interest over the bed and acts as a headboard substitute of sorts.

I grabbed some daylillies from the garden, too. How nice of them to be growing just as I needed a shot of orange!

In this before, you see the TV on a white table. In a perfect world, it's better to leave the TV out of the bedroom if you're trying to create a bit of a retreat. But in the real world...

...it's better to at least downplay the TV as much as possible. It disappears better on top of the dark dresser versus on top of the white table. (I managed to get more color in this part of the room by using some of the kids' art.)

Finally, I found the wicker rocker in a storage room and freshened it up with a few pillows that where elsewhere in the house (and I really don't think they will be missed) to create a little sitting area. A great way to make a bedroom more relaxing is to add a chair where you can read....or sit and admire your new room...

See the orange print above the white table (that previously held the TV)? You can't see it from these photos, but there are actually four of them in the room. The homeowner had all of them in storage.

I can't tell you how often that happens... People think they need to buy more stuff to make a room attractive when all they really need to do is to shop around their own homes.

Room makeover, a before & after: Taking back a spare room

Do you have one of these rooms in your house? Nearly everyone does. It's a guest room/storage room/retired furniture room/good place to hide to eat the last piece of birthday cake room.

I thought I'd show you a re-design of a room like that in a client's house. The homeowner used this room as a guest room for her mom. But there was also a wine cooler in there and a mish-mash of furniture that didn't quite fit anywhere else. (The fourth wall you don't see is a wall of closet doors.)

The homeowner wanted her mother to feel more comfortable when she stayed. So, we moved the wine cooler into the closet, and the wicker settee into another space to create a reading nook.

I moved the daybed to make it the focal point of the room and used the homeowner's blue and white bedding for a fresh look.

I grabbed a bookcase, coffee table and accessories from elsewhere in the house. (Take a little bit from here, a little from there and you really don't harm the look of the other rooms.)

I even brought in a patio chair. It's a placeholder until the homeowner gets a more comfy chair for the room, but it serves the purpose for now.

The blue and white in the accessories help pull the room together and the lamps make the room cozy.

Who wouldn't want to stay here... especially now that you know there's wine in the closet?

Room makeover, a before & after: Maybe I just want to hide...

I seem to have this thing about tents, like maybe I'm really supposed to run off and join the circus.

Case in point: Check out these two room re-designs that I did for a client. In both cases, I used curtain panels to create little fortresses in the girls' rooms.

Here, using a canopy frame that the family already had: Before:

and After:

And here hanging the curtain panels from the bump-out in the ceiling (I've explained this one in more detail in the past.)

Here's the before:

And the after (although if that wasn't obvious, perhaps I really do need to consider circus work for my next career...):

But, what to do in a boy's room? Good question.

Here's what I did for my son. I used two twin bed sheets and clipped them to a rope (do this only after your kid is past the pulling on the rope relentlessly until it comes out of the wall, and then hurting himself with it stage...) . I screwed heavy-duty closed hooks into the wall and tied the rope to them.

It's a fort when the drapes are closed, stage curtains when they are open. Pass the peanuts, please.

Room makeover, a before & after: And clean up those animal bones

Sometimes, when you're a young teenager, the best place for you to live is in a cave. So, the design above made perfect sense when I was given the task of remaking a room where a ceiling beam pretty much cut it in half. (See below for the before.)

(And if you think that room is messy, you are wrong. You just don't get me, never have and never will. And why can't I have a princess phone and an 8-track tape player? Oh, sorry, little PTSD flashback there.)

I hung curtains on rods that were screwed into the beam, on the side facing the bed. To hang the curtains across the foot of the bed, I strung fishing wire from the beam to the wall.

What was once a problem is now a hangout...a great place to talk to friends and tell them how Great Your Godmother Is for doing this for you...

A Snapshot: Bedside manners

Put a vase with fresh flowers on your nightstand and see how it transforms your room. Think boutique hotel. Think luxury. Think to throw them away before the petals start to drop and you start thinking: what is this mess?