A well-designed bedroom can be a place of peace.
The designer confronted with a bedroom featuring oak floors and whitewashed cupboards has part of her job already done. Oak floors add warmth and a traditional feeling to a room, and whitewashed cupboards offer a ready-made place to display books, artworks, and decorative objects.
Capitalize on floor and shelf details by keeping the rest of the room simple. Still, you'll need to consider paint color, furniture arrangement, and lighting. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
1. Empty the room of furniture. Measure and sketch out a floor plan, paying attention to the windows, doorways and cupboards. Measure the furniture you plan to put in the room--usually this includes a bed, bedside tables and a chest of drawers. However, if the whitewashed cupboards have drawers or closed doors, you could use them to store clothes. Use the graph paper to play around with different furniture arrangements.
2. Go to a home-improvement store and grab paint swatches in an assortment of colors. Tape these up on the walls to see how they look in the bedroom. Try each color on different walls--light makes a huge difference in how a color looks. When you've narrowed down your choices, you may want to go get small cans of each choice and paint small areas of the wall to see how you like the color--remember, you will probably be living with that color for a couple of years, so it should be something you like a lot.
3. Paint the walls and let them dry. Bring the furniture in and begin placing it around the room. Though graph paper helps plan and opens the mind to different design possibilities, it often takes seeing things in place before designers reach a final decision. Make sure you have a friend or family member with you to help you lift furniture and think about the room's design.
4. Hang paintings and begin placing decorative objects around the room. If you have open shelves in the white-washed cupboard, think about placing vases, picture frames, small figurines, and other assorted objects to decorate the shelves.
Hang pictures or artwork on the wall. You may want to keep these away from the shelves, which will provide enough visual interest on that wall.
5. Every so often, step back and look at what you've done. It's easy to get caught up in small details to the detriment of the whole design--so it's important to keep taking a few steps back and thinking about the relationship between all the objects in the room.
Tags: whitewashed cupboards, around room, begin placing, decorative objects, graph paper, think about
