Modern Master Bedroom Makeover on a Budget

Whew! The One Room Challenge is serious! Serious pressure, and serious motivation! It's been an exhausting six weeks! I was working down to the wire, but now that our modern master bedroom redesign is finally complete, I am ecstatic to be sharing the reveal photos today! 

Let me pause for just a moment to catch you up. The One Room Challenge is a twice annual blogging event hosted by the fabulous Linda, of Calling it Home. During the ORC, bloggers redesign an entire room in just six weeks time, sharing their progress each week along the way, leading up to the big reveal {that's today}. If you'd like to catch up on each of my weekly updates, you'll find the links at the bottom of this post.

There are twenty amazingly talented bloggers who headline each ORC event and nearly 100 more bloggers who join in the fun as linking participants {like me}. The headlining designers revealed their incredible completed spaces yesterday. And now it's time for the linking participants to take center stage and share their completed rooms. You'll find my reveal below, and links to all of the other reveals here.

In the spring, I participated in the ORC for the first time, designing a room for my toddler son that I dubbed his "Vintage Preppy Little Gentleman's Lounge." It was such a great experience that I couldn't pass up another One Room Challenge this fall. 

This time around I took on one of the most neglected spaces in our home - the master bedroom! Isn't it always the case that we put our own space last? Our house is three stories, and our master bedroom and bathroom, together with a deck, make up the entire third floor. It's great having such a private space, but it wasn't living up to it's potential. Our room wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great. It had the beginnings of a style that represented us, but it was incomplete and felt blah! Back in Week 1, I shared my plans for the redesign, which would bring a hefty dose of our Modern Metro style to the master bedroom.

You'll notice that quite a few things in the room stayed the same - the major furniture pieces, the layout, and the comforter. But there are also a whole lot that's new - the light grey paint color {that replaced blah tan}, the drapes, coverlet, rug, chair, ottoman, and a whole lot of new art! The room now feels finished, and it's a much more grown up version of our style!

Ok, so enough with the explanation. Let's get on with the photos! You can find the complete modern master bedroom source list here. 

Because the room has a fireplace {I know, so lucky!}, a large window, and two sliders - there's really only one good configuration for our furniture. When you enter the room - the dresser is immediately in front of you. We have a television on our dresser, and we really do use it daily, so it had to stay - but I've always hated that the tv is the first thing you see when you walk through the door. One of my major goals for the redesign was to make the television feel like less of a focal point - and the solution was to hang a gallery wall around the tv. 

More about the gallery wall later, but first let me show you more before and afters!

On the bed side of the room, the art needed an upgrade upsize, and the nightstands were desperately in need of some styling!

I love the new paintings above the bed, and to make them really pop, we created "frames" around them from trim moulding that we nailed directly to the wall {tutorial to follow}.

We painted the moulding around the art white to match all of the other trim in the room, which makes the dark paintings really stand out on the dark grey wall.

The pillow on the bed is really special to us because it is made from our wedding aisle runner. And the new coverlet was handmade by my mom from Nate Berkus fabric that I'd been lusting after for nearly a year.

For nearly three years, the corner of our room was occupied by a cradle. Each of our boys slept here for the majority of his first year. But now that we are out of the infant stage, it was time to reclaim this corner.

I relocated a bench from our second floor hall, and added a floor length mirror {something I've been wanting for a long time}. 

Above the bench hang two metallic finish photos of New York City. I shared the tutorial on these DIY metallic photos when I first started blogging {three more smaller metallic photos hang on the other side of the room}. During redesign process I decided I wanted these NYC photos to stay {although I did up date a couple of the pictures with ones we took on our babymoon to New York last spring}.

Looking toward the other side of the room, you see the two large sliders that used to feel like big black holes. I love our roller, solar shades that let in light and maintain our view of the mountains during the day, while still giving us plenty of privacy, but without drapes on the sides, they just didn't look good.

After searching for drapes and not finding what I wanted, I enlisted my mom to help make custom, flat panel curtains from that fabulous alphabet fabric. These flat panel curtains have a sleek, modern look that perfectly suits our style, and it also shows off the large graphic pattern of the fabric better than regular, gathered or pleated drapery panels. 

A while back I found a chair on sale in hopes of creating a cozy reading nook in the corner of our bedroom. 

The chair was comfortable, but it just wasn't working in the space - especially not with the black and beige rug {the pack and play also didn't add to the cozy reading nook vibe}. 

I wanted to find a chair with a higher back and more comfortable arms. Something I could really curl up in. When Home Decorators Collection learned that I was shopping for a new chair, they offered to sponsor my One Room Challenge by giving me a chair! With such a large selection to choose from, it was a difficult decision, but I ended up selecting the Meloni Armchair in black herringbone, and I am so thrilled with how it looks in the room. And it's every bit as cozy as I hoped it would be!

Since the Meloni armchair does not have a matching ottoman, and since the budget was tight, I purchased an inexpensive ottoman {which arrived needing some touch ups}. The Meloni has brass colored nailheads, and I already owned the silver side table. To tie everything together, I decided to add two rows of nailheads to the ottoman - one row brass, the other row silver.

Adding the nailheads was a bit labor intensive, but the adding this detail to the ottoman cost next to nothing and really makes it look so much higher end.

I am so excited to finally have a comfortable place to put my feet up and read {in all my spare time}. Reading for book club just got a whole lot more relaxing!

In the other corner of our bedroom is our large armoire. When we had babies in our room, I converted the armoire to baby central - with a changing station and all of the baby necessities {clothes, blankets, diapers, and swaddlers} hidden inside. Now that it is not longer needed as baby central, I have other plans for the armoire. The top of the armoire holds a small collection of metal skyline sculptures, but they were never much of a focal point.

To tie the armoire in with the rest of the room, and to highlight the sculptures, I picked up a shadow box canvas and created a quick and easy skyline painting {tutorial}.

I used metallic paints to help bounce the light around and add some interest to the top of the large black armoire, and to serve as a backdrop for the metal buildings. 

Next to the armoire hang three more metallic NYC photos.

I spent a large portion of the last six weeks planning this gallery wall, and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out.

Read my Gallery Wall Planning Tutorial with lots of tips {especially great for those of you with Type A personalities, like me!}

The painting that hangs immediately above the tv used to be above our bed. The scale wasn't right in its prior location, so I relocated it and incorporated it into the gallery wall. To tie in the beige and golden tones of the painting, I added the large brass R as well as a few touches of gold.

I wanted the gallery wall to be a mix of art and photographs, but I didn't have the budget to purchase any more art, so I made my own. I found three pieces of art that I loved at West Elm, and then set about creating my own versions to get the look for less {much, much less}. The book page spiral art was one of these three projects {you can read about the others here}.

The gallery wall also gave me an excuse to finally frame the extra photo stamps for our wedding stationery {a project I've wanted to do for a long time}.

The television sits on top of a wood stand that we built a few years ago to hold our DVD player and Tivo. As a result, the tv sits quite high, so I wanted to add some height to each end of the dresser to help balance things out. On right side are three vases that I collected for the room over the years.

And on the right side is a new lamp that I feel head over heels in love with! It reminds me of an old streetlamp, which fits perfectly with the modern metropolitan style of the room.

Next to the lamp sits our wedding invitation in a double sided frame {the text of the invitation is visible on the other side}.

And here's how the gallery wall looks when the tv is on. I love that it now looks like just another piece of art in the mix. In the coming weeks, I'll share my tips for planning a gallery wall in a limited, fixed space.

I like our wall mounted sconces, but I feel like they makes nightstand styling more of a challenge. I did a lot of experimenting and tweaking, but I finally came up with his and hers styled nightstands that I am really happy with.

My husband's nightstand is made more masculine by the addition of a bowl of black baseballs {he painted that striped bowl himself when I dragged him to a paint your own pottery place when we were first dating}.

 

On my side of the bed, the nightstand is made more feminine by the addition of a vase of tulips, and a wicker basket on the bottom shelf now gives me a place to store my design magazines for late night reading.

We swapped out the builder grade sconces for these silver string sconces when we first moved in, and I love them just as much today as I did on day one. They fit perfectly with the new style of the room!

That concludes the tour of my One Room Challenge Modern Metro Master Bedroom. I feel like we now finally have a retreat - somewhere to escape to at the end a long day after the kids have fallen asleep. It took a lot of effort for me to not fill the room with photos of our kids - but I really wanted this space to be about the two of us as a couple. The rest of the house is for the family - this space is for us. I love everything about it and look forward to sleeping here for the first time tomorrow night {we temporarily relocated to our guest room while the work was ongoing}.

Below is a collection of all the posts and projects in this Modern Metro Master Bedroom {more links will be added as I post additional tutorials}:


Want to see all of my other One Room Challenge projects? You'll find theme here.