No mini project today, friends (though I did finish the lasts coats of poly on three more colourful kitchen table chairs yesterday… sneak peak here). Instead, today I’m going to talk about our VERY RED bedroom and how we plan to “un-red the bed(room)”.

I introduced you to the bedroom on our house tour, but since then it’s got a bit of an upgrade in the form of a dresser. Woohoo! Drawers! I’ve also added some art to the moulding, but that’s just to “real it up” a bit in there, they’ll probably get swapped out as we grow into our space.

First let’s talk about the red. The red has got to go. It annoys me that it photographs fairly well, because in real life it is way, way, way red. So much so that it casts a sheen of pink on everything (and everyone) in the bedroom. Yuck. So, clearly step 1 (or at least a very important step): CHANGE THE WALL COLOUR. We’re planning on painting most of our living space a warm shade of white, and we are going to carry that through into the bedroom. We’ll add colour through furniture, pillows, window treatments, and art.

Second, let’s talk about the dresser. It was a $50 craigslist purchase, and it really wasn’t the best deal ever. On the internet it looked like wood (or at the very least a wood veneer). When we got to the seller’s home, the dresser was pretty much the ugliest fake wood laminate you’ve ever seen. However, we had just failed at getting an entertainment unit (which was much, much too big) and I was desperate a) to buy something so that our car rental that evening wasn’t a total waste, and b) for drawers in our bedroom. I also love the lines. So, that desperation (and little bit of love) led to buying the dresser anyway (without even asking for a discount… the shame)!

I think that somewhere deep in the back of my mind lived this dresser transformation from YHL. The starting point of which was this wood veneer dresser:

Look familiar?

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been living with the laminate dresser and I decided that I was sold on both the shape and the functionality. What I wasn’t sold on? The fake-wood laminate. But I think that once this baby stops trying to look like wood, I will love her. But I wasn’t sure exactly what to do to make me love her the most.

That is until I saw this faux bamboo chest on Centsational Girl:

And remembered this beauty from Room & Board (that I pinned on pinterest over a year ago):

And I was struck with inspiration in the form of a shiny peacock blue + Room & Board dresser mashup.

And then the inspiration came in waves: what it I painted our other bedside tables to match? And then upholstered a headboard in either white or peacock blue (or possibly a patterned fabric combining both)? And the next step will be recovering the box spring in the same fabric as the headboard. And window treatments, and ART! And repurposing our directors chairs in the same finishes to sit beside the dresser!

And then I got started with photoshop. (Please excuse my less than awesome photoshop skillz). Imagine these walls are a warm white, not this gross light pink colour. And also imagine that the headboard has texture (and tufting)!

Since changing up the colours is fairly easy in photoshop, I decided to test out a few additional colours. Of course I tried light grey (like the inspiration dresser), and also tried out a trendy teal and a timeless baby blue (I also tried a few shades of yellow, but even though yellow is my very favourite colour of all time, I just couldn’t get it to work for me).

I’m not loving either of the latter two, teal seems like it would date itself quite quickly, and (to me) the baby blue belongs in a(n awesome) nursery.

Love ’em? Hate ’em? Wish we were planning on keeping the red?