And so it begins. We've started, ever so slowly, on the renovation of our bedroom. Given our post-baby track record, we'll probably finish this project up, oh, when Chloe graduates from high school :o\

So here is the bedroom in its current state. *Shudder* I know, I know, shocking isn't it? Sad to say that we've lived in this sorry state of a room since we bought the house. While we have finished many other renovations in the house, we've neglected one of the most used rooms. Don't ask me why. That's just how we roll. Amazing how we don't even noticed the floral wallpaper border or fugly blue curtains anymore! But, no worries, because this room will soon be transformed. (And anyway, a really bad Before photo makes the After even better ;) ).

I thought you all might like to see how we HandyLuster's put a room together, so I'll be doing a series of posts on things like layout, lighting, fabric and paint selection for the room. First up, focal point.

The pic above is from the door when you enter the room. I wanted the room to have instant impact, which meant the wall facing the door should be the focal point. However, that bump-out in the wall limited where we could place furniture. So, we've gotten rid of it by framing out a wall around it, leaving us with a nice flat wall and clean slate to work with.

If you notice, we always try to add a bit of architectural interest in each of our rooms, like the window seat and built-in storage in the nursery, or the wainscotting in the dining room. In this vein, for the master bedroom, we decided on panelling for the wall. Chris at Just Beachy wrote a great post on this and I was inspired to do a few mock ups in photoshop. Here are a few options I came up with:






We'll be putting sconces on either side of the headboard and hanging a chandelier, so that had some impact on the placement of the panels. As with all of our designs, we were going for something not too traditional and not too contemporary. We're working with our existing modern espresso headboard and the new sidetables. As well, we have to design the room for without the crib (don't ask me when Chloe is moving out though because I don't know, lol).

I mixed and matched some of the elements to come up with a final design. I liked how the sconces sat on the vertical panels. I also liked the different sized panels... I just felt a regular grid would feel too modern. So once we decided on the look, HandyMan did up a plan to scale in Autocad and we came up with this:



We needed this plan because we had our electrician (hi Mike!) come in last weekend and put in potlights and plugs and boxes and switches. Had I been a bit more on the ball, I would have picked out the actual sconces and ensured they were the appropriate distance from the headboard and the side tables. But we didn't (I guess finishing the panel design at 2am the day before Mike arrived at 8:30am didn't help!) so cross your fingers we can actually reach the lights while lying in bed.

So those are a few of the things we thought about before we even lifted a hammer. More posts to come.