After almost a year of living in our new home and sleeping upstairs in the guest room to be closer to Parrish, we have finally made the transition to the master bedroom on the main floor. After always being people who didn't see the need for a King-sized bed because we like to snuggle, we have officially crossed over to the "other side." Mainly because Parrish tends to end up in our bed at some point early in the morning and the extra room is a must for 3 people. :)
This is how the room turned out and we are really pleased. To show you where we started, here is a "before" picture.
The bed was a hand-me-down from Cannon's parents when we got married. And while we liked it, we really wanted to make the room our own. We've focused so much on the rest of the house, so it was time to put some of that energy into our master retreat. The walls were a dark brown (BM North Creek Brown to be exact) which we have in our main great room and love because it is lightened up by breezy white linen curtains and light grey cabinets in the kitchen, but in the master with all of the heavy dark wood furniture, it seemed depressing.
So with the help of our super-talented friend and carpenter, David, we added built in bookshelves designed to encase the headboard we made.
The next step was to paint the walls (BM berkshire beige), bookcase (cream), bookshelf backs (BM Polished Slate), and ceiling (BM Wasabi). We designed the lower half of the bookshelves to be enclosed storage so we could hide our mess instead of putting it on display.
The bottom cabinet extends 6" from the bookcase so we have a place to set our books and glasses of water at night. David even thought to drill a hole in the corners of the cabinet to run the wires from our phone and alarm clock through...genius!
Decorating bookcases is not my strong suit, but I just "shopped" my house to fill them with books, family photos, my collection of baby silver from each of our children and ourselves, and baskets on the lower shelves for storing our tv remotes, hand lotion, etc.
The top 9 shelves are decorated with antique butterfly prints from ebay. They are actually printed on fabric and were used in old field guide books. They were super cheap and easily framed for a reasonable price because they fit into standard 5x7 pre-made frames.
If you don't already decorate with antique prints, I highly recommend it! Just about anything can be framed and old print pages from antique books just give your home that since of nostalgia that only items collected along the way can bring. My favorite place to search for antique prints is on ebay, and they always have a great selection at Scott's in Atlanta as well. To make the most impact, group the prints together.
Excuse the glaring flash in this picture, but I was trying to show some of the things I filled the bookshelves with. One of my favorites are these pieces of white coral we collected on a family trip to Barbados years ago. I think I was pregnant with Parrish when we went. I remember being so excited to find this white coral all along the beach and have decorated with it several places in our home throughout the years.
Master sitting area before, and master sitting area after.
We still need to hang the mirror (vertically) for some height, but I love that we're using our larger buffet from the living room in place of the oak chest of drawers because the large wall called for something with a little more bulk.
I love monogrammed pillows with a coordinating stripe of fabric down the center. In our case we used left over fabric from our bedskirt to accent the medallion fabric we used for euros and a throw on the bed.
We grouped together our large framed family photos in our master hallway and I love the impact hanging them all together gives versus hanging them separately (as I had them before).
We used the popular velvet octagon fabric for our headboard. My super talented seamstress sewed the fabric together for us and David cut a piece of plywood to size for us to glue 3" foam to the center of, cover with batting, then stretch the octagon fabric over it. The french brass nailhead trim was so much easier to install than I anticipated because it came on a roll and I only had to nail a head every fifth one. Because of this we did two rows...one by the foam and one on the outer edge of the plywood.
You can see in this picture that we ran electrical for two drop pendants on either side of the bed. This is really my favorite part, a) because I love the steam punk light fixtures from Shades of Light and b) because we had the electricians install switches with dimmers on the inside of the bottom cabinets. It is so nice to be laying in bed reading and be easily able to switch off the light before falling
asleep.
We love the finished product and are finally enjoying our master bedroom!
In the master bath I changed the wall color to BM Boca Raton Blue, changed the hardware to yellow milk glass and added the coordinating striped bath mats from CB2.
The only other change was our fabulous octopus triptych I hung above our tub. I had seen this on a tv show and found out the original cost thousands of dollars. Luckily other people liked it enough to do a knock off poster version on
allposters.com, so I was able to order those with an online coupon then use a groupon deal to have them custom framed for half price.
You can also find the octopus graphic for free on
thegraphicsfairy.com.
Other happenings in our family over the last week have included a father's day lunch at the river with Grandaddy Jack (I love this picture of three generations of Prickett boys) and the arrival of the shirt Parrish designed from Bundle NYC.
The look on Parrish's face when he opened the package was priceless. He put it right on and is so proud. Especially of the back label where they printed "Parrish Designs." He said, "it looks even better on the shirt than on the paper!"
We're in full summer swing with daily trips to the pool or slip n slide parties in the backyard and yesterday one of my friends, who owns a restaurant in Childersburg, brought a baby gift from one of her customers to our back yard gathering. Apparently this customer has followed my blog since she heard about our loss and prayed for us and asked about us since. When she heard I was having another baby boy she hand knitted me the most precious baby blanket, booties, and bonnet. On the card she simply wrote, "For the child I have prayed for, for you". Cannon and I were so touched by this random act of kindness and continue to be amazed at how we can be having a particularly hard week emotionally (which has been going on a lot for me lately) and someone being the hands and feet of Christ will do something or say something so kind that it is like salve for our aching wounds. There is so much bad in this world...we are inundated with stories of depravity daily in the news, but it's rare that you hear stories like this. The small random acts of kindness of strangers that are so unexpected but so meaningful.
Lately I have been wrestling with coming to terms with the fact that we will never really "heal" from loosing something as precious as our baby girl. Time passes and on the outside we seem better, but it will always be hard and messy. We have just learned to function and live in spite of the constant hurt that is in our chests. I didn't think it was possible for a heart to actually ache until we lost Olivia and now I go to bed with this ache and wake up with it in the morning. Some days I wonder why I am bothering to put one foot in front of the other because it hurts so bad. I wonder how I can possibly be expected to "do" another day's details while missing her. The hurt makes it so hard to be able to function the way I used to. Little things - organizing schedules, making decisions, and managing daily relationships - that used to come so easily, suddenly seem much harder with this ache in my chest. Something seemingly small that wouldn't have otherwise upset me can now have the power to send me into a depressing crying jag.
And then I think of Parrish and how horrible it would be for him if his mommy never got out of bed and let the hurt consume her. I already worry that he has to see me cry so much. I reason that this will make him a very empathetic person. I not to cry in front of him, but it's like he has a sixth sense when I am upset because he always seems to find me and when he does, he just puts his little arm around me and rubs my back like I do to him when he is sad. The other day he said, "we did all we could to save her, mommy." It breaks my heart to hear such grown up words coming from my baby boy's mouth and that he has to comfort me when he shouldn't have to.
I lay these worries and so many others at the foot of the throne on a daily basis and pray that one day I will be able to leave them there permanently.
