Change of Heart, Part IV

In the continuing story of the changes that have been made to the house over the past three years, this post is all about the bedrooms and bathrooms. There will be one more post after this one that will showcase the living room and the loft. Without further ado, gentle readers, I give you the master bedroom as it looked before I moved in:


Take note of the bears--the woman who lived here before really liked bears--really, really liked them. Bears. Aren't. My. Thing. At. All. Here's what it looks like now--a view to the east, where the previous owners had their bed:




On the top left, check out my new shelves that I hung up a few weeks ago.

My dressing table:

A view to the west shot just as McKenna came up the stairs. She always rounds the corner and takes a flying leap toward the bed.

Here she is on the bed--I usually don't allow her to get on the down blanket without covering it with a sheet first, but I let it go for a minute so that I could take some pictures for you.

The down blanket is so comfortable that McKenna is falling asleep before she puts her head down:

The master bath before:

The same view today:

A view of the south wall:

The sink area before:

And now:

Moving on to the downstairs bedrooms and bath... When I moved in, the ugly carpet in both bedrooms (the teal atrocity you see below) smelled like cat urine, so I had to rip it all out, except for what was in the closets.

Side note--when I tore the carpet out, I put it at the street for the trash guys to take away along with the dishwasher that died the day I moved in. A gentleman from up the street drove by in his truck and stopped to peruse the pile of stuff at the street and wanted to know if it was okay if he looked at the carpet, which was rolled with the backing on the outside. I told him he was welcome to look at and/or take whatever he wanted, but I did disclose that the carpet smelled like cat urine. He took one look at the teal carpet and told me that he was not interested because the color was so ugly. He did, however, want to take the carpet padding to reuse in one of the bedrooms of his mobile home. I repeated the cat urine information, but he really wanted the padding, so he took it away. In this same conversation, he also told me that he didn't think that dishwashers were ever "a hit" because most people had dishwashers already--their wives. Not a good thing to tell someone who went to a women's college.

Anyway, I don't have any pictures of the downstairs bedrooms before I moved in, but imagine these rooms with teal carpet and hospital green walls and you have a pretty good idea of what I was dealing with. Here's the east bedroom now:

Both of the quilts on the beds in the guest rooms came from my dad's side of the family as did the quilt at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom.

More of the east bedroom:

This bedroom has a lot of pansies in it--they are my favorite flower, so people often get me pansy things as gifts and most of them end up in this room. The small hanging that you see on the left below was made by Grandmother of Ken--it's a gorgeous counted cross-stitch that I love.

The west bedroom (the quilt on the wall was purchased at a flea market in Dallas):

Finally, one of the most drastic transformations--the downstairs bathroom. Bear in mind that this is the only bathroom on the first floor and would be the one that guests would use. And this is what it looked like before:

Bears. Everywhere. Click on the photo to enlarge it and see for yourself. There was a bear/tree border and underneath the border, they had sponge painted the walls. All of the rugs were bears, the towel holder, soap holder, toothbrush holder, and toilet paper holder were also bears. The light switch plate cover was too big for the bathroom, so they put that out in the hallway. After we ripped up the astro turf on the porch, this stuff was the second thing to go--and they left all of it for us. We might have given it as a gag gift to someone on my dad's side of the family ;-)

So here's what it looks like now:

My new shower curtain (sometimes trolling Big Lots pays off):

The sink area now--note the absence of bears:

That's all for now--there isn't a bear to be found in this house, upstairs or downstairs. Soon I'll be posting about the last two rooms.