All Together Now

Hey friends!

I've shared snippets of my bedroom over the past few months but have yet to post photos of the room in its entirety. Now that my headboard project is finally complete, I thought I would show you the whole room and share some of the little storage solutions I came up with.

First, a little backstory is probably necessary. This won't be surprising to those of you who know me in real life (or who have read this post), but for anyone new, hopefully this will give you some context. I've recently moved back to my parents' house temporarily. My plan is to be here for a year, pay off some student debt without incurring any more, and figure out what I want to do next. I've been in grad school for the last five years, and although it took me awhile to realize it, it never felt quite right. Not like me. So I decided to take a break, move back home, and see if I can find something out there that I like doing more than what grad school was training me to do. I'm lucky enough to have a super amazing family who may have privately thought I was crazy but were always vocally supportive of me following my heart. So basically, I've condensed my one-bedroom apartment life into a one-bedroom-no-apartment life. And I couldn't be happier :)

Even though this space is temporary (and very small), it was really important to make it feel like my own if I'm going to be happy here for a year. I basically emptied the room of everything that had been in it while I was away (My parents were using it as a guest bedroom). The only parts I couldn't change were the wall colour (out of respect for my Mom, who loves it), the mirror (which was hardcore bolted into the wall), and the closet door. If it were a more permanent space, I would probably paint the walls a charcoal grey, but for now, this purpley-grey from my teenage years will do just fine ;) Here are a few "before" pictures. I forgot to take them before the room was completely emptied - but this will give you an idea of the space.

View from hallway

Apparently, my camera lens was dirty.... Oops!

Old box spring I had yet to move.

Here is the after, filled with the minimal furniture that I kept from my apartment. The desk and dresser were Habitat for Humanity Restore finds in Windsor. The desk is actually next on my major project list. The desk chair was a Kijiji find, also in Windsor, that I sprayed pink (and needs to be touched up, thanks to moving damage). Bed linens are HomeSense. Pillows are Ikea & Home Outfitters. Curtains are Wicker Emporium. Lamps are HomeSense. Art is from Etsy, Wall Blank, and HomeSense clearance section (of all places).

In the photo below, you can see that some of my art is hung fairly high up. I initially intended to hang the frames a little lower but realized that because of the minimal pass-by space at the end of the bed, I would have knocked the frames off the wall every time I walked by if they weren't up high enough.

I love the way this space feels now. It's colourful and girly and exactly what I wanted.  I think that people too often underestimate the impact their environment has on their moods and they don't make temporary spaces their own. It was fairly easy to make this room feel like my space, and yet when I leave, my family will be able to revert it back to a guest room with minimal work.

Here are a couple of storage solutions I came up with:

(1) Hair products/Toiletries/Etc. are kept in the rolling cart on the left, updated in this post.
(2) Although not a storage solution, the shelves were part of the original decor and couldn't be removed due to chipped paint underneath. I updated them with decorative paper here.
(3) The dresser houses casual clothes and fabric boxes underneath hold socks/etc.

(4) Low fabric box holds hair tools and slides under bed easily.

(5) Low Rubbermaid container, without lid (originally meant for gift wrap, I believe) holds all of my bags and slides easily under the bed.

(6) Over-the-door hooks hold all of my scarves.

(7) Jewelry is stored on hooks and in a desk drawer, as shared in this post.

(8) Makeup is stored in jars & a bowl underneath the window, as shared in this post.

(9) More clothes (& shoes) in the closet. In order to illuminate the dark inner corner, I mounted an inexpensive halogen light that you press to turn on.

So, that's my bedroom! Very colourful, very feminine, very me (at this point in time, haha). Hope you liked it!

Save the (Headboard) Drama for your Mama (Or Papa, as the case may be...)

Oh, hiiii. I've been an absentee blogger this past week. My apologies. Real life has been busy (in a good way!) and blog life has suffered, unfortunately. But I'm back! With another headboard post!

So, I finally got around to hanging my headboard on the wall. IT. WAS. DIFFICULT. Unnecessarily so. The problem was that our first attempt wasn't very well thought-out. Consequently, it made the project way more complicated than necessary. After a much-needed frustration/lunch break, SuperDad came to the rescue yet again and delivered a MUCH more simple and straightforward hanging technique.

Here is the first thing we tried, a.k.a. the WRONG way to hang a headboard on the wall. We had this little kit:

Mostly, we wanted it for those D-hooks, which would go on the back of the headboard itself. We reasoned out that putting the hooks 2/3rds of the way up the headboard would keep it flat against the wall (i.e., not floating out at the bottom/top). This is great in theory. Unfortunately, trying to hook the D-hooks onto screws in the wall when they're a foot out of the reach of your fingers is pretty much impossible. We tried using both long skinny pliers and twine to hold the hooks upright but neither worked. They kept flopping down and we couldn't get them to hook onto the screws. Eventually, we decided to move the D-hooks higher up on the back of the headboard - approximately 1.5 inches from the top. That way, we were able to reach behind and hold the D-hooks in the right position to slide them over the screws. Much better.

Original placement (after careful measurement)

D-hook in place

After moving both D-hooks closer to the top of the headboard.

The second problem we encountered was that the wall anchors that came with the kit didn't have washers, so the screw disappeared into the wall. Without anything to grab on to, we couldn't lock the screw a couple centimeters out, which was necessary to hang the D-hooks on the screws. Luckily, I had these metal hollow wall anchors on hand, so we decided to use those instead of the anchors that came with the kit. I'm making this sound like a much faster decision-making process than it actually was ;)

SuperDad also decided to add an extra washer in between the screw and the anchor, so that the screw stood out even further from the wall. This allowed the D-hooks to have better purchase on the screws, making the headboard much less likely to slip off accidentally.

Don't mind all the pencil marks from our many attempts ;)

And here's the finished product:

If you remember what the headboard looked like initially, you may notice that it's a few inches shorter now. That's because it was propped up on top of the mattress in the initial post, and now that it's hung directly on the wall, it's a few inches lower than the mattress, as seen in the photo below.

When we finally figured out what the heck we were doing, the project was pretty simple and only took about 15 minutes. We really made it much more complicated than it needed to be. If you try it yourself - learn from our mistakes: use heavy duty metal anchors and attach the D-hooks high enough on your headboard that you can easily reach them with your fingers. So, now the headboard project is officially 100% done. Sigh of relief.

Something looks different around here...

Those of you who have been here before may notice that things are looking a little different today. For awhile now, I've been wanting to update the look of the blog to make it cleaner so that the focus can be on the content, rather than on the background. My super sweet and artistic friend, Nicole, created this banner for me, and I just love it! I hope you like the new look too!