A couple months after we moved into our house, our good friends K and J were kind enough to sell us a very pretty wooden bed for our large guest room at a deeply discounted rate. The rustic wood grain and style of the bed was lovely, especially against the light green walls of the guest room where it had resided in their house, and the size of the bed was perfect for the space we needed it for in our house. Unfortunately, the caramel color of the guest room walls in our house turned out to be a very similar shade to the natural wood of the bed, and we quickly realized we needed to figure out a way to bring more contrast to the situation.
So last weekend we finally bit the proverbial “bullet” and set out to paint the bed white (we went with an off-the-shelf white from Valspar in a semi-gloss, the same color we used for the trim on the main floor of the house). We thought the bright white against the rich caramel of the wall would provide some seriously dramatic contrast while at the same time helping to brighten up the room. (An added bonus is that it will tie in with the white trim we plan on eventually implementing throughout the upstairs.) Since we had never undertaken a furniture painting project of this magnitude before, I consulted what I consider to be the bible of DIY how-tos: Young House Love. Sherry and John have a post on their site that covers how to tackle just about any do-it-yourself project one can come up with. We followed the instructions here pretty much verbatim, with the exception of adding the high-gloss poly coat at the end (read: the project ended up taking way longer than we had anticipated and we got lazy). It all turned out well though, since high-gloss with the rustic design of the bed might not have made for the right partnership. We retained the rustic look by NOT filling in any of the dings/cracks in the frame and simply painting over them with the semi-gloss. And we are very happy with the results.
So without further ado, the reveal:
Before
After
As you can see, it really brightens up the whole room and helps break up all the brown tones. Notice the dresser to the left….that’s next on the refresh list. Stay tuned for more details on that project.
