Slow Living
Our master bedroom makeover after the kids left cost about $2,100, took one winter, and started with the lighting rather than the bed, which is the reverse of every makeover I'd read and the reason this one held. The bedroom had been low on the priority list for years. Every other room demanded more: the children's rooms needed to be functional and safe, the kitchen needed to feed four, the living room needed to survive two teenagers. The bedroom just needed to be a place to sleep, and that was the compromise we lived with for the better part of two decades. When our youngest left for college I finally allowed myself to look at the room properly, and it looked like a place two tired people had been sleeping in. This post is what we did and in what order, the two sconces and the small chandelier that changed the room more than the bed did, the linen, the rug, the one piece of art, what stayed, what it cost line by line, the mistakes, and what an empty-nest bedroom is for, which turned out to be a different question from what a bedroom is for.
A queen bed with a fabric headboard that had a coffee stain the shape of Ohio. Two floor lamps flanking it, because the nightstands were too small for lamps and the walls had no sconces. A builder flush-mount on the ceiling with a 5000K bulb someone had put in during a bathroom project and never changed. A carpet from the previous owners. A dresser with a television on it. Curtains that had been in the room when we moved in, which was ten years ago. Nothing in the room was wrong exactly. Nothing in it had been chosen, either, which is the difference I've spent this blog on, and the bedroom was the last room in the cottage where it showed, because it was the last room anyone else saw.
I started with a pair of bedroom wall sconces at reading height, which replaced the floor lamps that had flanked the bed and freed the floor and the nightstands at once. The electrician added two boxes at 60 inches, the height I'd finally learned from my sconce height mistakes, and put the ceiling fixture on a dimmer while he was there. That was the first weekend, about $520 with the fixtures, and the room was already a different place: warm light at the level of the pillow instead of a pole beside the bed and a cool square on the ceiling. I lived with that for a month before I touched anything else, because I wanted to see what the light asked for. What it asked for was linen, and a ceiling fixture that wasn't a builder's flush-mount.
After a month with the dimmer I replaced the flush-mount with a small chandelier, 18 inches across, understated, with simple arms and plain fabric shades, hung with the bottom at 84 inches from the floor, which in a bedroom with an 8-foot ceiling is as low as you can go without meeting it while changing the sheets. On the dimmer at 15 percent in the evening it creates a quality of light I've never been able to describe to anyone who hasn't seen it: warm, still, and slightly ceremonial, the way a dining room feels when the candles are lit and nobody has sat down yet. It's the fixture people ask about, and it was $240. The bulbs are candelabra filament LEDs at 2400K, from the bulb test, and at 15 percent they're the color of a fire going down.
Only after the light was right did I buy anything soft, because the light decides what colors look like, and I'd have bought the wrong linen under the old 5000K bulb. New linen bedding in a warm oatmeal, washed until it went soft, which took about eight washes and is in the linen washing post. A jute rug, 8 by 10, under the bed, over the carpet we couldn't yet afford to remove, which hid it and warmed the floor and cost $260. A new headboard, plain oak, no fabric, no stains possible. The television went to the guest room. The curtains became long linen panels on a plain rod, pooled a half inch on the floor. The dresser stayed, with its top cleared to a lamp and a dish, per the five-object rule in my cottage post.
A single large-format print of mountain fog over the bed, 40 inches wide, in a plain oak frame, hung with its center at 58 inches and its bottom 8 inches above the headboard, lit at night by the two sconces that flank it. That's the whole wall. The gallery of family photos that had been in the room went into the hall, where they're seen more and where they belong; a bedroom wall with twelve frames on it is a wall you never stop looking at, and a bedroom is for stopping. The print was $180 with the frame, and it's the thing my husband mentions when people ask what we did to the room, which tells me the room reads as one decision rather than fifteen.
The dresser, refinished with a coat of oil. The nightstands, which turned out to be fine once they didn't have to hold lamps. The carpet, for now, under the jute rug. The mattress, which was three years old and good. The paint, a warm white that was already right and that the new light made look intentional. About half of what was in the room stayed, and all of it looks different, because the light and the linen around it changed. That's the part of a bedroom makeover the magazines skip: most of the room doesn't need replacing. It needs to be lit as if it had been chosen.
Two wall sconces and their boxes, plus the ceiling dimmer, with the electrician: $520. The chandelier and bulbs: $262. Linen bedding, duvet cover, sheets and four pillowcases: $410. Jute rug: $260. Oak headboard, secondhand and refinished: $190. Linen curtain panels and rod: $230. The print and frame: $180. Oil for the dresser, a new dish, hooks for the robes: $48. About $2,100 over one winter, half of it soft goods and a quarter of it light. The lighting was the smallest line that made the biggest difference, which has been true in every room of this cottage and which I keep writing down in case it stops being true.
I hung the sconces at 60 inches to the center, which was right for our bed, and then bought a taller mattress in the spring, which raised the pillow top 3 inches and put the light an inch too high for my husband's reading. The sconces have adjustable arms, so it's fine, but measure from the mattress you'll have, not the one you have. I bought the linen in "natural," which under the chandelier at 15 percent looked pink; the oatmeal replaced it, and the natural set is in the guest room under a different light where it looks fine. And I put the chandelier on the same switch as the sconces for the first month, which meant the room had one mood; the second switch was $90 with the electrician's return visit and it gave the room five.
Light first: sconces at reading height on their own switch, the ceiling fixture on a dimmer, warm bulbs, and a month of living with it before you buy a single soft thing. Then the fixture on the ceiling, if the builder one has to go, hung low and dimmed lower. Then the bed and the linen, chosen under the new light, in the evening, with the dimmer where you'll actually keep it. Then the rug, which fixes the floor you can't afford to change. Then one piece of art, hung low, lit. Then clear the dresser and the nightstands to a lamp and a dish each and take the television somewhere else. Then stop. I did it in that order by accident, because the electrician was available the first weekend, and I'd do it on purpose the next time, because every decision after the first one was easier for having the light right.
For $500: two plug-in sconces on adhesive strips ($120), a plug-in dimmer for the lamp you have ($12), 2700K bulbs everywhere ($20), a linen duvet cover only ($150), a secondhand rug ($100), and the television moved. That's the light and the softest surface, which is 70 percent of what our room feels like now. For $1,000, add the curtains and the print. The chandelier and the electrician are the last $600, and they're the part I'd save for rather than skip, because the dimmed ceiling fixture is the thing that makes the room ceremonial rather than just nice, and "ceremonial" is what an empty-nest bedroom has time for.
Reading, 9 pm: sconces at 60 percent, chandelier off. Winding down, 10: sconces at 30, chandelier at 15. Talking, which we do more now: chandelier at 15, sconces off, and the room is a warm box with two people in it. Morning in winter, 6:30: chandelier at 40 for ten minutes, then off, because a bedroom at full brightness at dawn is a punishment. Making the bed: everything at full, which happens twice a week and is the only time the room looks like a photograph in a catalog rather than a room. Four settings on two switches, and the sconces' own switches on the fixtures for the nights one of us reads and the other doesn't, which are most nights, and which the floor lamps had never managed in nineteen years.
We didn't paint, because the warm white was right and paint is the thing people do first because it feels like progress; under the new light it looked new anyway. We didn't buy a new mattress, because the one we had was fine and the money went to the chandelier. We didn't add a reading chair, which every makeover includes and which in a 13 by 14 room would have been a laundry stand. We didn't put anything on the nightstands but a lamp-shaped nothing (the sconces do the lamp) and a dish, and the nightstands have stayed clear for two years, which is a first. And we didn't do the closet, which is the next winter's project and which I'm told by my husband is optional. The makeover was smaller than the word suggests: light, linen, one rug, one print, and a great deal of taking things away.
For nineteen years the bedroom was where we slept between the parts of the day that mattered. It's now where we read, where the coffee gets taken on Saturdays, where the door gets closed at nine with the chandelier at 15 percent and the sconces at 30, and where we spend more time awake than we have since before the children. The room is quieter than it has ever been, and I don't only mean the sound. The makeover cost $2,100, and it gave us a room, which we hadn't had, and it did that by starting with the light, which I'd do again in any bedroom, empty nest or full one. The bedroom is finally the room we rest in, and the difference between that and a room we slept in is two sconces, a dimmer, and a fixture that makes the light look like it was meant.
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