Claire’s Big Girl Bedroom
We’ve met with five design/build firms about our renovation, and all agree that our budget isn’t big enough to do everything we want. (It may have been in 2019, but costs still haven’t come down much from the pandemic highs…) We’re going to have to do the renovation in phases, and we won’t know exactly what we can include in phase one until we get a master plan with each component priced out but the biggest discrete component for us to put on hold is the basement.
The basement was finished when we bought our house in 2018; it had probably been done in the ‘70s and the whole space was wood-paneled and boasted wall-to-wall shag carpeting. There was so much water damage that we had to rip it all out before we even moved in, so our basement now entirely unfinished. The plan is - was - to have a bedroom and full bath down there that would serve as a guest suite, but for now we’ll have to keep a bedroom upstairs as an occasional guest room.
Because of how we’re hoping to reconfigure the second floor, we’ll lose the second-biggest bedroom that currently serves as our guest room / office. The new office will be too small to work as a guest room, so the thought is to design Claire’s room to be able to be a guest room when needed. Robbie’s room will have a trundle and Claire can sleep there with him when visitors stay over, and her room will have a queen bed so it’s more comfortable for adults. (Plus, we already have a super comfy queen mattress and I don’t want to get rid of it or store it until we do the basement!) That won’t leave a lot of space for other things in the bedroom, but I think that’s okay. Here’s what I’m picturing:
I’m usually loath to block any natural light, but there really isn’t anywhere for the bed to go except against the windows. That back wall is south-facing and gets so much sun that this bed won’t make a huge difference, especially since the headboard is only 37” high at its height in the middle, which is between the windows anyway, and lower on the sides, where they’ll be in front of the windows. I don’t want to go overboard on the scallops but love this rug whenever I see versions of it in bloggers’ kids’ rooms. It’s my concession to influencer marketing, ha.
Claire actually chose this watercolor chinoiserie wallpaper while I was scrolling Chasing Paper and I love it too! The idea of covering a whole room in a high-impact pattern is a little out of my comfort zone, but there are really only two walls - and maybe we’ll do some sort of millwork on the bottom half of the walls and just paper the upper half.
I bought a mirror very similar to the one pictured at an antique store in England when we were over at Christmas with the intention of putting it in Claire’s room, and we have two small brass-and-marble lamps that I snagged at an estate sale last year that just need new shades. We’ll move the nightstands currently in the primary bedroom into Claire’s - they look like the Ikea ones in the collage - and keep the dresser I just bought at auction to go in her closet. I’m thinking white Roman shades and just Benjamin Moore’s White Heron paint for the trim and ceiling to keep things simple against the wallpaper.
So there we have it: the plan for Claire’s big girl bedroom, repurposing items from around the house as much as possible but buying new where needed. Of course, this is predicated on the structural changes we want to make to the back of the house being included in phase one of the renovation - cross your fingers for us, please!
