Creating the Primary Bedroom Of Your Dreams

Creating The Primary Bedroom Of Your Dreams | Blank Slate

When we first moved into this house, every room was a basic gray paint with nothing on the walls and no kind of treatments or customization, a true builder house. I originally thought I wanted our house to be all neutral colors, but the longer we have lived in this house, the more colors I want to add to it! I spent 9 months deciding on the very first thing I wanted to do and then a year after that coming up with my final design. Today I am going to walk you through that entire process and how I landed on the final design!

I have linked all the supplies, tools and things I added to our room at the bottom of this post.

Creating The Primary Bedroom Of Your Dreams | Accent Wall

First, I added a shiplap wall along the back wall of the bedroom. I didn’t want the standard shiplap look, I wanted this to be seamless which meant I needed boards that were 15 feet long. Usually when shiplap boards are that long, they are going to be wider as well. And these kinds of shiplap boards aren’t found at Home Depot or Lowe’s. So I did some shopping around to local lumbar yards and found one that carried these primed MDF shiplap boards that we 18 feet long. Even better, they were willing to deliver them to me! This was great since my truck bed is only 5 feet long. I did find these about 3 months before I planned on doing the project so once they were delivered, they sat on the floor of our kitchen for a few months. But it was worth it in the end!

The Husband was going out of town for a long weekend in April to visit his parents for their birthdays, and since our bedroom is his office, this was the perfect time to do this accent wall. I enlisted the help of my 12 year old cousin to help me carry the boards up the stairs and lift them into place since this was definitely a 2 person job. I measured how much to cut off of each board and cut the boards before we took them up the stairs. We then placed each board on the wall and used the brad nailer to secure them to the wall.

Like I said, I didn’t want this to be a standard shiplap wall. White shiplap is very farmhouse and that’s just not my style. I knew early on I wanted this wall to be a dark color. I originally thought I wanted just the shiplap wall to be the dark color, I would later change my mind. For the color, I went with Black Forest Green by Benjamin Moore.

I did also decide to frame out the window. It didn’t have a frame originally and framing it out would cover up the issues with shiplap lining up with the window (when you do DIY, you discover that walls and windows are not square!). I used 1x2 pine boards to frame out the window and then used my favorite wood stain which matched the bench I made for the end of our bed.

Creating The Primary Bedroom Of Your Dreams | Light Fixtures

After a few months with the accent wall, I started to see hanging pendant lights on Pinterest that I fell in love with. I put them into a design board for the space and kept an eye out for them on a few sites I liked to shop on. I wasn’t super set on the exact style but I loved the concept. You can see how I edited it into a picture above. I spent a few months looking around comparing different styles until one day, there was some construction being done at the end of our neighborhood. Suddenly our power went out! I went outside to see what was happening and it turned out something was being done at the end of the street and there was a major surge that took out the power to the whole neighborhood. The power came back on pretty quickly but I noticed that our kitchen lights weren’t coming back on and neither were the four lights in our bedroom. These lights appear to be canned lights but are LEDs that are built into the fixture. So once they were out, I had to replace the entire light fixture. I decided this was the perfect time to find and install the basket lights I had been looking at for so long. I did end up getting new LEDs for the other spots in the house. I discovered that the lights were not recessed canned lights, they were just regular lights that were secured to the hole in the ceiling. Which made installing the new lights pretty easy!

I found these lights from Lowe’s for $130 each, which was an awesome deal! You never know the quality of a light when it is that inexpensive. So I was thrilled with the quality of these lights! They really look great and are the perfect size. The other nice thing is the cord to hang them with is pretty long so you can adjust them to the length you need. I love how they ended up looking in our room!

Creating The Primary Bedroom Of Your Dreams | Painting the Rest of the Room

After a year of living with the accent wall and the rest of our room being gray, I decided I needed the entire room dark green. I kept looking at dark rooms on Pinterest and I felt like as long as I left the ceiling white, there would be plenty of light in our room. We also have three large windows along one of the walls in our room which provide a lot of light. I wasn’t all that worried about lighting and the room being too dark. Instagram didn’t believe me though! It took some convincing to get people to see my vision but I think I converted a few people when I was done!

I did two coats of paints on the walls and I love how it turned out! I did use a flat finish for this paint, mostly because that’s the same finish of the paint in the rest of our house. With a darker paint, you will see hand prints, dust and scratches on the wall with flat paint, so keep that in mind if you decide to do something like this!

The paintable outlet covers I used are the plate and the outlet cover combined so you don't have any white peeking through. I primed them, painted 2 coats with a paint roller, just like I did for the walls. To match the screws as well, I dipped them a couple of times with a few minor touch ups when installing the plates back on. The installation is super simple, you just take off the old plate and replace it with the new painted one, being careful to keep it nice and flush. Make sure the screw is as tight as it can be so that your plugs will still go all of the way in. I did keep the trim and ceiling white to pull extra light into the room. 

Creating The Primary Bedroom Of Your Dreams | Finishing Touches & Switching Out the Fan

The nightstands we had in our room were very small. They were hand me downs that we got from my parents when we moved into this house that I painted white and swapped out the hardware. They did the job for awhile but I was finding that since we don’t have bookshelves in our room, I was needed more space to put things in my night stand. Most of the time, I had a stack of stuff next to my night stand which was driving me nuts. I also found that the nightstands were too small for the basket lights. That sounds weird but because of their size, The Husband and I were often hitting our heads on the lights any time we tried to get something off of or out of our nightstands. I found these awesome nightstands on sale at Walmart for $110 each, which again is insane! Not only were they taller than the previous night stands, they also were wider, which looked so much better next to our bed!

I then added a new curtain rod and curtains that were actually the correct length for our room (the previous curtains I had just weren’t cutting it). Very last minute, I decided to build a new desk for The Husband (who works from our bedroom) that better fit the aesthetic of the room, which I did exclusively with scrap wood! I will do a separate post on this later this week!

The last thing I did was to switch out our fan. There was NOTHING wrong with our fan. And while it didn’t exactly fit the style of the rest of the room, I honestly would have left it if we weren’t having a really weird issue with it. In our neighborhood, the houses are really close together. The street is very narrow so the houses across the street are pretty close as well. The houses are all pretty new and were built by the same builder. If you have any experience with a new build house, you may know where I am going with this! Our builder bought items in bulk and used them throughout the houses in the neighborhood. One of those things was the ceiling fan. The exact same fan is also in Jackie’s room. So whenever we used the remote for our fan to change the speed or turn the light on or off, we were also messing with the fan of our neighbor across the street. Having those giant three windows across the front of our houses is great for lighting, but not for this! And any time they did anything with the remote for their fan, it changed our fan. Which wasn’t a huge deal except when it started to happen late at night! I tried changing the frequency on the fan and the remote but that changed nothing. So I decided this was a great time to get a new fan! I looked around and found this one on sale at Home Depot and loved the design. So I took a chance and ordered it. Of course it arrived and it was even better in person! I had never installed a fan before so I was nervous about doing it. I was able to get it done in just a few hours, which I was pretty proud of!

Creating The Primary Bedroom Of Your Dreams | Results

I know I keep bringing up how much I loved each individual piece of this new space but you are probably wondering I how feel about the entire thing now that it is done. Well, I love it! It is so cozy and calming. The dark green is exactly what I wanted in this space and The Husband actually got a lot of compliments on the new color during video calls for work.

Like I mentioned, I will share more details on the desk I built for The Husband later this week! If you can’t wait that long, you can find the build plans here.

You can also find all of the links for our bed, bedding, lights, night stands and curtains below.

Creating The Primary Bedroom Of Your Dreams | Shop