I titled this blog post because I’ve realized just how much change makes people nervous. I get it. We don’t want to make a bad choice, spend too much money, or damage something beyond repair. I was in the same place until recently. I was okay making some changes and bringing in different furniture or art, but I didn’t want to make a bad paint decision.

Our house was new when we bought it, and it was so pretty in its newness. But, like most homes, it’s builder basic; nice, but lacking a bit of character. The thing is, we like character. We’d also never owned a home before, so everything we did to any other house we’d lived in was temporary and this one was ours and we didn’t want to mess it up. It left us with a nice house, but not one that reflected who we were as people and as a family. We’d painted a few rooms, but chose lighter, less “scary” colors that we could easily paint over if we hated it. That changed once we slapped some bold stripes on our guest room wall and began to shake the feeling of nervousness and really go for it style-wise. I’m still happy each time I pass the doorway of that room and see those stripes winking back at me. I hear you, stripes, and I’m doing something about it. Time to tackle the Master Bedroom, land of major neglect.

Why do we tend to leave our Master Bedrooms for last? I understand getting the common spaces livable and company ready, but it’s a big ‘ol lump of blah when we get to the place where we lay our heads every night. We really should change that and treat ourselves to a great space, since we’re in there a lot more than we think. I drew up a vision of our room about a year ago, then just kind of sat on it. Then one morning about 3 weeks ago, Husband-Face woke up in a “Do House Projects” mood and announced he was going to go get paint for our room. Not one to sleep on a husband with a fire lit under him, I quickly yanked out the paint swatches and waved a lovely gray in front of his face and pointed him toward Lowe’s. But I wasn’t 100% feeling it, and I realized why. I was punking out. I had that same shade of gray in my front hallway, my striped bathroom, my laundry room, and on the patterned wall over the desk in the kitchen, for the last four years. It was gorgeous, but it was more of the same and I needed to shake things up and steer away from the gray.

I don’t know why, but I suddenly saw my drawing come to life with a shade of blue instead. In that instant, I felt more excited than I ever did about doing the wall in gray. So I switched to the blue swatches and chose one that was somewhere between charcoal and indigo, and I swear it made my insides tingle. We rushed off to the store and found the same color sample in the store and next to the other colors, it looked purple. Purple?!?! Nope, not nearly what I wanted. So, I searched through the others and found several variations on the blue and settled on the one that was in that place between charcoal and indigo. The moment it went onto the wall, I didn’t regret a thing, and I couldn’t wait for the finished product and to share it with you. So here it is, my improved bedroom with the not-so-scary dark paint:

And we’re in love. It is both warm and cool, soft and industrial, and completely a place we look forward to relaxing at the end of the day. One of the best things about this is that it has big impact with little effort. It’s just HGTV paint in Indigo Batik, gold vinyl dots from fab.com, lamp cords from World Market, and Edison globe bulbs from Lowe’s. The night tables are bar carts from Target, the white metal box and gold-handled tote are from Home Goods, and so is that fantastic hourglass.

 There are a few lessons I learned from this. One, be flexible. Sometimes the idea we originally had is no longer working, so don’t let it box you in. That’s how you end up with a room you don’t love and you’ll probably forego any other decor changes in your space. Two, big impact doesn’t mean big undertaking. This can be done in a weekend. Three, if you have a vision, go for it! You are probably having that vision because it’s something that makes you happy and makes sense for your lifestyle. What works for you works for you, and what works for us, works for us.  And if we hate it in 4 years? We’re not scared…it’s only paint.