Happy July 4th, everyone! I hope you have a great weekend grill out with family. We do not have a grill yet – the old grill left behind by the previous owner was too gross to keep (thanks though!). We did order a new grill, a sexy beast to say the least. Cannot wait for it to be delivered.
After removing the old carpet and expose the hardwood flooring, we aimed to set up our bedroom and Slav’s office as soon as possible. A good night sleep is necessary for carrying out all the physical work we are doing, and some downtime at night on his computer is well-deserved for Slav.
I always wanted cozy bedrooms. However, the two bedrooms we lived in the longest in the past were either big, or directly open to the rest of the house (no door). Our new bedroom is 10’6″ by 11″. It can take a king bed comfortably, yet with ample room for bedside tables. Just like my all-time favorite bedroom below:
Our bedroom has a closet wall. However, the wall of closets was divided to two, with one opening to the office.
Bedroom closet
Office closet
This setup left very little closet space to the bedroom. Although I have been working towards a minimalist closet, I have a husband who does not throw away anything. Between Slav’s mom, who buys clothes and bedding for us constantly, and Slav himself, who refuses to let any old T-shirts go (“they carry memories!”), we need additional storage.
After consulting with Slav, we decided to get a storage bed. Coincidentally, the morning we went to IKEA, Emily Henderson published a post on storage bed. You bet I was reading through it while shopping in IKEA!
I love a storage bed that has simple lines and big drawers, like this one from Muji. I might ask Slav to build one in the future. But for now, we picked IKEA BRIMNES for its simplicity and storage capacity. Slav also wants it in black – he picked up the classy BEKVÄM stool in black too, which we had in NC but in birch color.
This is how our bedroom looks like in our moving day – dirty window frames, old carpet, and cheap curtain rods.
After removing the carpet, we threw our mattress on the floor, and lived like this for about another week.
Slav spent a day to piece the storage bed together:
meanwhile, the living room became a dump ground while waiting for its own IKEA furniture.
At the last minute, we decided to rotate the bed 90 degrees. We gain 3 more inches this way for the drawers to be fully open.
Waa-Daa!
Slav also took the broken metal frame off the window and installed blinds. We plan to get bigger window down the road, so good window treatment can wait. We purposely mounted two big blinds (35″) side by side, so we can get an idea how 70″ wide window would work with the bed. We can also play with the length of the adjustable blinds to find a desired height for the new window sill.
We did not like the king headboard options in IKEA, and we still do not know what type of headboard we want yet – antique? Something dramatic? With comfortable padding or bare wood? How tall should it be? I found this headboard on the Design Sponge. It will work for our bed, but it is a bit too modern for our taste.
What we had a clear vision for are the bedside tables. Slav has been using a drum his best friend gifted him a while back. It works for the few things he keeps next to bed. And any multi-function furniture is a win in my book.
As for me, I have been hoarding a live edge for a while. I found it in a discount store for $10 in Nashville. It has since been used as a candle holder, a center piece for the dining table, and a kitchen shelf. But this is what I really want to use it for – as a bedside table.
Two of the deep drawers hold our winter bedding and towels
And the other two hold Slav’s shorts, jeans and winter layers.
Slav has lots of pants and shorts, but he always piles them up and only wears the ones on the top of the pile. These drawers allow him to see all the pairs he has and provide easy access to any of them. Hopefully we can get more clothes into the mix.
We are only using the outer edge of the drawers – they are much deeper and can easily accommodate another line of clothing. But I have no plan to fill every drawer to the brim in this house. We voted on not buying any outfit until we consume what we have in hand. In another words, we will only be REPLACING our clothes.
With the heavy stuff out of the way, we are able to fit all of our clothes in the two closets:
Bedroom closets
Office closets
All of my 3-season clothes are in the bedroom closet. Slav wears T-shirts and shorts 99% of the time, so his T-shifts and underwear are kept in the bedroom closet too. The office closet is filled with his shirts, sweaters and winter coats. He accumulated lots of them when he was young and lived in New York. But during the last 11 years of living in SoCal and the South, most of these clothes were just collecting dust. They will definitely get some use this winter! (Let it snow!)
We are still far from the minimalist closet I’d like to have. But we live in Colorado where winter clothes are needed, and they take a lot of space. We have the plan to redo the closet with IKEA PAX system, and potentially to reverse the office closet to create a bigger bedroom closet. For now, I put up a pair of curtains over the bedroom closet for a cleaner look:
These curtains are also from IKEA.
We hung only one painting – the one Slav gifted me at our last anniversary:
It is painted by Adam Faglio, our favorite Polish painter. He is a family friend and what he painted is the castle in Slav’s hometown. You can see more of his work here.
Our bedroom is far from finished, but it is clean, comfortable, functional, and minimal. I’d like to bring some plants into the room, and get snow white bedding when we need to replace our current ones. I love this bedroom from the Design Sponge. And I think green plants and a bigger window will make our minimalist bedroom a truly peaceful place.
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