We’re finally making our final strides on the upstairs. Our bedroom is done (minus those pesky closet doors), so we’ve officially moved in. We were a bit eager, a lot of furniture and décor pieces were purchased well in advance. This did kind of turn our dining room into an obstacle course, but when the room was finally finished we already had everything on hand to move in.

Our bed is the most exciting part. We have been sleeping on a full size bed for almost five years, neither of us are small people, so it’s been pretty rough. A queen is only 6 inches longer and 6 inches wider, but it’s amazing how much of a difference that makes. I had a small checklist when searching for the right bed, must haves: tufting, fully upholstered, and storage drawers. This really did narrow down the selection, but eventually we found the perfect bed. Putting it together was quite a task, it came in five separate boxes and the instructions were trying to go the Ikea rout by using images instead of words…but definitely not as clear as Ikea instructions. It took the two of almost three hours to put it together.

This is what our room looked like while putting the bed together….

But all of that chaos turned into this!

I was worried about buying a rug online because one never know what the color will actually look like. The rug turned out to be a couple shaded darker than the bed which worked perfectly. Add a box spring and a mattress and we’re good to go. The bed is super tall, I really love tall beds, I don’t know what it is, but I just feel like they’re more luxurious.

Since we were going with a very simple color scheme I wanted to try and add texture with the textiles in the room. I loved the faded pattern in the rug, and choosing curtains with a pattern that would compliment without being too much.

The wood finish of the night stands helps add some much needed warmth to the room and balance out all the cool blues and greys. I switched out the drawer pulls to a more modern chrome, keeping everything cohesive. The contrast also adds some interest, the original pulls just blend right into the wood

I found an awesome dresser on Craigslist that works perfectly with the night stands. So I love the dresser, it has 12 drawers which we really need, it’s solid wood and very much our style. But it weighs almost 300 lbs. It took two people to get it into the house (thanks Ash), that alone was a struggle. Once it was in the house, we realized there was a chance it would not get up our windy stairs. I knew it could technically fit, but it would require a lot of strength to maneuver. I did look into lifting it over our balcony..it is quite expensive. So we hired two movers from Task Rabbit, which we thought would be enough, but alas it was not. Thankfully John came to the rescue and helped out, Seth had a sprained finger at the time, so one good hand was not going to do it. With removing the banisters, and the landing window we were able to get it up the stairs! It will never come back down, if we ever move it will be gifted to the new owners. I plan to replace the hardware in the dresser as well, but I have yet to find the perfect drawer pulls, I know they’re out there somewhere.

Now it’s onto adding the final touches, art, photos, shelves. Essentially making it look like actual people live in our home.

The stairway is not the most exciting part of the house, but it is important. When you walk in the front door it is smack dab in your face, so it definitely needs some attention.

Unlike the rest of the house, the stair and landing walls have that horrible textured plaster that had a moment of popularity which I will never understand. Not only is it very unpleasing to the eye, but honestly it’s bit dangerous, both Seth and I have shed blood more than once just bumping into a wall. As I would like to not fear going up and down the stairs, we set about removing it.

The first choice would be to take down the walls and put in new dry wall, but that would be a lot of clean up as a number of our walls are slats with horse hair plaster. So the alternative thought was sanding down the wall enough to skim coat. This turned out to be quite slow and demoralizing. After putting in probably about eight hours of work Seth realized the top coat of plaster actually chips off. Surprise! This was way more efficient and we got the whole hall and stairway done over a weekend.

I had to do two coats of skim coating with sanding in between to get a semi smooth finish. I toyed with the idea of doing three, which it definitely could have used, but I decided I was happy leaving a little “character”.

Now it’s just paint, paint and more paint. We’ve primed the walls and are now ready for color! I’m a bit obsessed with grey, it’s a great neutral. Because the stairs lead into the foyer, which leads into the kitchen, which is partially open to the dining room (you get the point), I wanted to make sure I chose a color that would also work in the foyer and work with whatever color we were to choose for the kitchen and downstairs living spaces in the future. Once it’s done it will be a welcomed focal point, not a spikey mess.

It’s now been a whole year since we moved into the house. The time went so fast. I still remember post blizzard moving day, so stressful, but super exciting. We had a lot of plans when we first got into the house and really unrealistic timelines :). We’re definitely not where I thought we’d be, but all in all I am happy with what we’ve accomplished thus far. I’m quite proud of how skilled we’ve become at so many things. I’d say we were both pretty handy before we started this grand project, but we’re on another level now. Also, we’ve finally moved upstairs!…more on that in a future post.

So what have we been working on since December? A lot of work on the walls in the upstairs bedrooms and hall. For starters, we closed up the wall between the sewing room and the master. It was kind of weird once the drywall went up. For the last year it’s felt like one large room. In the beginning we were almost tempted to just turn the house into a two bedroom with one really large master. But after further though we realized that would be terribly impractical. I have to admit this wall made me a bit nervous, if it wasn’t done well it would be very apparent there used to be a large opening. The taping job turned out pretty well. But what really helped blend everything together was the baseboard, after that was added it really made it look like the wall had never been opened in the first place. We fit wood into the base and then had to find matching base caps to blend in with the rest of the room. As usual, once we added paint it blended right in.

The upstairs window trim required some handy work as well. I don’t like to get rid of things that have been in the house for years and years so I tried to keep as much of the trim as possible. Two out of four of the window sills were cracked. Sills were something that I assumed one could run into Home Depot and purchase, but that is not the case. After checking a variety of hardware and supply stores, we determined that window sills must be made. So make them we did! Because the trim is so old, we could not find exact matches for pieces that needed to be replaced. We managed to keep the windows in the sewing room original and build new trim in the guest room.

The guest room has been painted a medium shade of grey. The neutral color will give me freedom when picking out all of the fun things like curtains and accessories. Amazingly we’ve managed to have overnight guests in our currently chaotic home, but we’re looking forward to the first time we have the guest room in use for the first time.