Last month I joined up with a project SRB started called “who needs it?” It will be a year long effort at decluttering the stuff in our lives – be it physical or emotional clutter. It’s never too late to join in!
At any rate, last year while I was pregnant I had already started trying to clean up / clean out a few areas in my life, and I’m going to start writing posts outlining the areas that I’ve already worked on.
Because I wasn’t doing it as part of this project back then I didn’t think of specifically taking before pictures, but here are a few photos of the evolution of our master bedroom. I figured since we spend about 1/3 of our life in this room, it was important to feel relaxed in that space, so that’s where I started. I still need to tackle the closets (up next since I can now get rid of my maternity wardrobe!), but with the closet doors closed, I actually feel at peace in our bedroom. 🙂
These first pictures are from right after we moved into the house in June 2010. We gutted and remodeled the kitchen area before moving in, and other than that we just repainted all of the walls in the house and had the carpets professionally cleaned. For the master bedroom we chose a color that we thought would be a soothing blue color, but it turned out to be a bright crayola blue. We both hated it SO MUCH that we went out the next day and bought the green you see here, even though we were completely burnt out on painting at the time. We routinely comment to each other how grateful we are that we changed it right away or we both know it never would have been done!
Over the past four years since those pictures were taken, there have been a couple of major furniture additions to our room. We bought 2 MALM dressers at Ikea for storage and to hold our TV & satellite stuff (the top left drawer also holds our DVD player & various hookup cords / movies/etc), and the elliptical moved into our room when the office/exercise loft at the top of the stairs turned into Stella’s bedroom. We also got a basic metal frame for the queen bed so it wasn’t on the floor, but apparently I never took a picture of the room in that state.
Last summer I wasn’t sleeping well thanks to being pregnant, and since we had been talking about upgrading to a king sized bed some day anyway, we decided to pull the trigger and get one! We wanted regular king instead of cali-king for bed sharing purposes (we wanted significantly wider, not longer), and I wanted a bed frame that had drawers for storage and a headboard for my water/alarm clock/cell phone/etc. When Stella slept in our room for the first 6 months of her life, it was constantly annoying to me to not have an end table because of the co-sleeper, and I figured having a headboard with storage would solve that problem. I was right! We ended up buying a platform bed frame online & a king mattress from a local furniture store.
During the transition and assembly phase:
After the new frame was assembled and bed delivered! (July 2013)
When Harvey arrived, it necessitated adding a few more items to our bedroom for the time being. The co-sleeper (even though he rarely sleeps in it, the twirp!), and the changing pad for diaper changes (so I’m not waking Stella up in the middle of the night for diaper changes). I also cleared out the top two drawers in the right hand dresser for diapers & newborn clothing for Harvey. The rest of his clothing is in the closet in Stella’s room, and I’m not quite sure how we’ll handle that. Eventually they’ll be sharing that room (probably by this summer?) so I guess we’ll figure it out then.
So there ya go! The room is a bit more cluttered now than I’d like, but unless we build an addition on our house, the elliptical needs to stay in our room (it just barely fits to unfold it along Charlie’s side of the bed in order to watch TV while I’m working out), and it’s just handier to have the changing pad & newborn items in our room for the time being. We’ve debated moving our bedroom to the actual master suite downstairs, but we really like having a guest room, so for now, things will stay like this. We’ll see how it goes when we have a 6 month old and 2 1/2 year old sharing a room this summer. 🙂
The cosleeper looks soooo cute next to the giant bed haha 🙂 maybe that’s just my 39-week pregnant mushy brain taking though haha. I would be TERRIFIED to have two babies/toddlers in the same room, but everyone I know who does it that way says it works great! So I’m sure you guys will love it.
It’s very cute, and yes, your preggo brain is a bit mushy I think. 😉
I’d be terrified too if I had your daughters! Praying it goes a bit easier for us.
It looks great!! Makes me want to climb into that bed! So cozy. If a 2 1/2 yo and 6 month year old sharing a room doesn’t go well, please don’t tell me because our kids have no other choice than to share a room for the next many many years (we are thinking until Lids is 10)! I figure if whole Dominican/Haitian families around us can all share a room, our kids will manage. Hopefully the same goes for your two because having that guest room must definitely be handy for friends and family visits.
Oh ya, I’m sure we’ll figure it out. We always shared rooms as kids for goodness sakes! I’m just hoping the Harvey is sleeping through the night by the time he’s in with Stella, but we shall see. 🙂
Your bed looks so look comfortable! I often think how nice it would be if Savannah & Shane shared a room. They are both completely obsessed with each other so i know they would love it.
It is SO comfortable. Worth every penny! We were sleeping on a hand-me-down bed that Charlie had from before we started dating 10 years ago. It was time to invest in some quality for ourselves. 🙂
I always shared my bedroom as a kid (until I was 10 or so?) and it was great fun when we were little. I’m hoping it goes well – we shall see!
My boys have been sharing a room for more or less one year, they started when the baby was 7-8 mo, something like that. The amazing thing is that George NEVER wakes up when Stevie does. He can sleep through wailing and repeated ‘mamamamamama’s. But god forbid I flush the toilet, which is next to the children’s room – on that note, all the houses we have seen had the children room next to the bathroom. WTF?!? Anyway. For a while, they even shared the bed, and it was sooooo nice to see how they held hands together while sleeping, how they always gravitated to each other and ended up in one corner of the mattress. Now we have bunk beds, which is fun as well, but from time to time, G asks to sleep downstairs, with S. If they didn’t whack each other so much during the sleep, I would let them sleep together more often.
I agree about the bathroom – ours is right against their bedroom wall as well. Makes no sense!
Glad to hear they bed shared for a bit. That was our plan too until big enough for bunk beds… we shall see.
[…] that I definitely have different emotions regarding different areas of my life. I just posted my master bedroom decluttering post, and honestly, that was an area that was easy for me to de-clutter, which is probably why I started […]
Oh, but I have the jealousy for your bed! That said, I can see how having it take up more space, well, takes up more space! Baby stuff does tend to eat up a house if unchecked, but it sounds to me like you’re checking it! I LOVE your wall colour – seems like it really speaks to how restful a space you are cultivating. Our current wall colours (gross beige and ice blue “accent wall” from previous owners makes me nuts every time I go in there. Might need to bump that room up on the “to paint” list because of this post!) Really enjoyed this perspective.
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