Primary Bedroom and Bath
Executive summary: This room is unnecessarily large for us, but we’ll enjoy it for now and turn it over to the kid(s) when the time calls for it.
It’s hard to say exactly when my husband and I started living together when we were dating in college, but if I had to pick, I’d say it was the summer after sophomore year when my husband (then-boyfriend) got his own apartment right down the hall from mine. I had two roommates while my husband had a 300-square foot studio apartment to himself, so that’s where we spent our time and I kinda de facto moved into his place. We were in a 100-year-old building with what looked like plates stuck on the walls to cover up holes, a bed that slid under the raised bathroom floor, and a fridge in the living space since the kitchen was so miniscule. Yet we have fond memories of our time together in that studio, and maybe it was that impression combined with my minimalist drive that convinced me to go studio-style in our last apartment, with our bed in the living room and the lone bedroom given over to the kids. So now that we have our own bedroom in this condo, I find myself rather flummoxed by the space (which is even larger if you include the en-suite bathroom and walk-in-closet). I could go on a shopping spree and fill up the room just for the sake of filling up the room, but my minimalist conscience would pain me to no end. So I’m opting to keep it fairly open, and I’ve already stretched my comfort level by acquiring two small dressers to flank the bed (to serve as nightstands), an armchair to grace an empty corner (but we do use it!), and a floor mirror to be a functional piece of decor that commands a little presence on the big blank wall opposite the bed.
Bed frame: IKEA | Pillow cases: Crate & Barrel | Throw pillow: Crate & Barrel | Bedspread: Amazon | Gold hoop art: Amazon | Lamps: Target | Dressers: IKEA | Dresser knobs: Home Depot | Table clock: IKEA | Curtain rod: Rejuvenation | Curtains and rings: IKEA
I’m sure I could visually amp up the room if I wallpapered the wall behind the bed with something bold (in either color or pattern), but I don’t want to make any more quick decisions at this moment. I’ve had to make a long string of them just to get us moved in, so I want to take a break and see how I feel about this room after living here a while. I don’t mind a serene white bedroom, so maybe the wallpaper will never happen. Alternately, I could put a colorful rug on the floor, but that’s low priority too. I imagine in a few years, we’ll be turning this room over to one of the kids, and we will overhaul everything then. Yes, that’s the plan – when the kids get old enough to want their own rooms (they have asked to share a bedroom for now), my husband and I will move into the current flex space/ tiny guest room and give this room to either the kid who wants it more or the kid who we love more (jk).
Clipboards: Target | Armchair: Target | Pillow: Crate & Barrel | Leaning ladder: Yamazaki Home | Throw blanket: Amazon | Picture: DIY, frame from Michael’s, background from Paper Source | Desk: Target | Chair: Target | Mirror: Target
One tiny design upgrade I did make was to get nicer knobs for the IKEA dressers. Honestly, the ones that came with the dresser looked like little cylindrical nipples, so I definitely wanted to replace them. Anthropologie makes some really cute ones, but spending $20 per knob (which would cost $120 a dresser) didn’t make sense to me, so I ended up finding these little “gray pumpkin” shaped ones from Home Depot for $5 each. Done x 12.
The dressers look so much better with a super easy swap of the knobs.
As for the primary bath, it’s a very beige/brown room and we’re not allowed (by Stanford) to do anything about it. So I put a runner on the floor and added some pretty mango wood accordion hooks and called it a day. There is also another piece of art above the toilet that is blocked from view in the picture, but we can easily see it when standing in the bathroom, and it brings in another pop of color. Like with the bedroom, you could imagine wallpaper transforming the bathroom, but I’ll hold off on that for now and see if it’s a design itch I’ll yearn to scratch someday.
Runner: Costco | Accordion hooks: World Market | Turkish towels: Amazon
The truth is, if my husband and I hadn’t nabbed this condo with the extra flex space that we can turn into a pseudo-bedroom, we would’ve been content camping out in a walk-in-closet for the foreseeable future. Many of the other floorplans in our complex don’t have the extra flex space, so I imagined that the kids would each eventually get a bedroom, and that would leave us with the walk-in-closet if we didn’t want to go the murphy-bed-in-living-room route. I’d toured some other units and even taken measurements of said closet to ensure that we could fit a full-sized bed inside, and I’d come up with a color scheme for the walls and ceiling to transform it into a cozy sleeping cave for us. Turns out I didn’t need to do all that (but I enjoyed myself, so I won either way, ha!) but I share this fact to underscore just how much space we *don’t* need for ourselves, and thus why I struggle with this primary bedroom. Over the years, I’ve become so accustomed to small spaces that I have a much harder time figuring out how to be a minimalist in a larger home!