This Housewife’s birthday was just about a month ago, and for my present, I requested The Accountant’s participation in some home improvement: We did a little makeover of our filled-to-the-max second bedroom!
Our second bedroom serves multiple purposes. It is an office, a guest room, the Accountant’s closet, the place we hang-dry our laundry, and the place where we iron and get ready for work in the morning. In addition, we store lots of things there, like the extension leaf for our dining room table, my various craft supplies, excess luggage, our off-season coats, and our books. All this, in less than 121 square feet. It is nothing short of a triumph that we fit everything in there when we moved into our apartment in June 2008.
After living with the room for a year, I had lots of ideas about how to improve it. The purpose of the makeover was to solve a few problems…
1. The wall color was depressing me.
You can see it there above the closet door on the left – a rather unimpressive off-white. Blah.
2. The Ikea curtain panels were no longer thrilling me.
The picture above was taken not long after the panels were installed. Sadly, after a year of wear and tear, they were looking a little sad, and perhaps, were never that great in the first place. They served the purpose (hiding the Accountant’s clothes storage), but fell a little flat.
3. The positioning of the bed was less than ideal.
The queen size guest bed was shoved against a wall. This was because I originally planned to treat it like a daybed, with pillows along the wall, making it serve as a big couch when not in use by guests. But, we ended up with this Ikea bed (a bargain craigslist find after we discovered the bed frame we really wanted was discontinued), which, due to the headboard, doesn’t exactly work as a daybed. Plus, we had overestimated the size of the room from the start – a queen size bed in a room so small can’t really be “tucked aside.” The positioning of the bed was fine for friends of ours who used it, but for, say, my in-laws…? Neither of them should have to crawl in and out of bed.
4. The big ol’ desk…
Okay, it may not look that big in this picture, but that is a 29.5″x59″ desk in a roughly 11′x11′ room. Too big! Of course, I had my reasons for getting a desk that large. When we moved into this apartment (our first two bedroom place!), I had visions of the Accountant and I each having our own small desk in the office. Even with our overestimation of the size of the room, it became clear that two desks weren’t feasible, so we opted for one large one (Ikea Vika- mix and match legs and table top), thinking we could work side by side. Well, the reality is that the Accountant prefers to work sitting on her recliner or at the dining room table, otherwise she’ll sit at the desk, and I’ll use her laptop or my ipod on the guest bed. So we ended up with this large desk in this little room for no reason whatsoever.
With my list of grievances in mind, I browsed paint samples, created an account on floorplanner.com (which is fabulous and free, by the way), and got to planning!
The project is now just about complete, and pictures are soon to come! Stay tuned!
