Before and After: This $600 Bedroom Makeover Is Giving “Chic Parisian Hotel”
If you’re a homeowner or you’ve recently been on a house hunt, you know that when you buy a house, you’re buying it all: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Thankfully, most everything is changeable if you have the time, willpower, and budget.
In Sarah Blumer (@saynihay) and her husband, Joel’s, home, the bedroom was in rough shape. Although the walls look white, they were actually covered in a subtly off-white striped wallpaper. That wallpaper was one of the features of the room that made Sarah want to redo it the most. “I don’t understand the point of putting up a wallpaper so subtle that you can’t even see it,” Sarah says. “There was also dark wood trim and dirty carpeting.”
Still, Sarah was able to look past that because she loved the windows in the bedroom — in fact, they were one of the main reasons she bought her house. Here’s how she made the rest of the home match the statement-making windows.
The paint took two tries, but now it’s just right.
“We wanted to have a moody, colorful bedroom that we’d be happy to wake up in,” Sarah says. The first step involved wetting and scoring the wallpaper to remove it, and it came off easier than expected, Sarah says. For the “moody, colorful” factors, that meant going bold with paint.
At first, Sarah took a risk and attempted painting a mural inspired by the work of Racheal Jackson (@banyanbridges). Despite having several cool murals that did work out in her home, she didn’t like how this particular attempt turned out. “I learned that if you’re going to paint the kind of geometric mural that Racheal is a pro at, you have to have copious amounts of precision while painting,” she says.
So, after running into trouble with the mural, she opted to “color drench” the room (inspired by some rooms she’d seen on TikTok), and the all-over teal (Behr’s Aqua Smoke) added drama into the space. “It looks like a completely different room,” Sarah wrote on her Instagram stories. The color is a perfect match for the Wayfair bed frame, making it all blend together in the best way.
In addition to paint, the walls got picture frame molding.
Also a vast improvement from the barely-there wallpaper before? The new picture frame molding and artwork. “It’s giving chic Parisian hotel, and I’m here for it,” Sarah says of her new walls. Sconces on either side of the bed sit perfectly within the picture frame molding, too, making the entire wall look balanced and totally chic.
The floors were restored. Plus, the room got new furniture and decor.
Sarah knew her primary bedroom had great windows going in, but what she didn’t know was that underneath the carpet, there were gorgeous, unfinished hardwood floors which didn’t need much work except for staining and sealing.
With such a beautiful view and, now, beautiful floors, Sarah wanted to introduce a bit of pattern into the room. The finishing touches to the room include pillows from Kip and Co., a shag rug from Rugs USA, and a semi-flush light fixture from Homary. Because Sarah had some of the furniture before her paint project, her total for this latest bedroom iteration was about $600. “We love how it turned out,” Sarah says of the space.
Inspired? Submit your own project here.