Master Bedroom Re-do

Oooh goodness. It hurts me to even look at these photos! We used this bedroom as our guestroom for almost the first year in the house, and then - after much deliberation - decided to make this our bedroom and the room across the hall the baby's room.

Our hesitation was mostly because this room is super narrow, and there isn't a great place for our Queen sized bed to live. AND you might have noticed that it had a horrendous wall covering. That, my friends, is paneling covered in contact paper.

At first, I wanted to take down the paneling, but this super fancy paneling was put on with special seams that tightly gripped it to the wall - you can kind of see them in the top two photos. Also the ceiling, which is in decent shape, was redone after the paneling was installed, meaning that if the panels were removed, there would be a gap around the perimeter of the room. Ugh!

So, covering it up was the best near-term solution. I found six rolls of thick grass cloth wallpaper for sale on Craigslist for $30 (total!), and my Mom came up one weekend to hang them all. We went right over the contact paper and crazy seams, which you can obviously still see a bit through the paper. The trim got painted white, and my Mom made those pretty floral curtains for me. I picked up new shams at West Elm, lamps at Target, and called it day :)

This isn't my ideal bedroom in any way - the shape is still tough to arrange furniture in, and the walls are still wonky. But it is so much better. I didn't think it was possible for me to feel even remotely positive about this room, and now I really like it. Thank goodness for forgiving grass cloth and handy mothers!