Curtains and Paint

I've decided that the two things that make the biggest change in a room are curtains and paint.  Unfortunately, we are a little too early in the renovation process to do much painting, but we were able to add some new curtains and at least start planning for a painting project.

In the guest bedroom we took down the tennis racket border, hung some pictures from out bedroom at the townhouse and added some new brown curtains.   

 I will not miss this.

Good-bye tennis rackets and hello new artwork!

New curtains.

We also added some new curtains in the dining room.  They don't block my view of our shirtless neighbor blowing his leaves in our yard, but they still look nice.

I haven't hemmed them yet -- that's a task that I seem to put-off when it comes to curtains.  I don't mind the way they look but I tend to suck them up in the vacuum cleaner and then spend several seconds fighting with Dyson before I think to turn it off.  

Our laundry room looks something like this.  I don't know if there wasn't enough of just green paint or yellow paint when these cabinets got painted or maybe we had a Green Bay Packers fan, but either way they drive me CRAZY!   The laundry room is about the only room that I can paint right now so I scored some new paint during a recent Sherwin Williams sale. 

 This was one of the first visits to the house last year.

 I decided on the gray color on the right for the walls and the cabinets and trim will be white.  We will probably replace the utility sink and backsplash, but for now everything else will stay the same.

Master Bedroom

As you can see in the original house photos the color scheme in the master bedroom needed some help.  The master bathroom remodel and closet relocation is scheduled to be our first major renovation so we don't want to spend money on paint and flooring until the bathroom is finished.  With our old bed and quilt (brown, blue, and green paisley) the colors in the bedroom would make me start to twitch if I kept my eyes open too long.  Not to mention that the lovely pink flowered curtains cast an awful pink tint out of the bedroom windows at night.  Something had to change!  Even Andy was fed up the the curtains but the master bedroom was the only room upstairs without blinds in the windows.

We took down (and happily trashed) the curtains and hung blinds in the windows.  A few weeks later we bought the curtains and shears.  They still need hemmed but are much better than the original.

New blinds.

New curtains and shears.

Getting rid of the curtains brightened up the room which actually gets decent sunlight, but the room was still dark without a ceiling light.  Without the old curtains I though I could handle a fully lit room so we installed a ceiling fan and light.

New fan.

As part of the move we planned to get a new bed so that the old bed could move to the guest bedroom.  The new king bed arrived at the end of January and we couldn't be happier.  King beds really are huge (but wonderful)!

 New bed and bedding.  The dog was free with the deal :-).  It almost goes with the carpet....ALMOST!

And then the weekend after the bed arrived the wallpaper border had to come down.  A new steamer made short work of the border (we actually found 2 borders when we started to remove them).  

 Bye-bye border!

Good-bye ugliness. Just imagine matching curtains!! 

 The room actually looks bigger without the border.  If I lay in bed where I can't see the carpet the room doesn't seem so bad anymore.