light yourself up.

The master bedroom has undergone a massive overhaul in our two and a half years here...

Move-in day...original curtains, original wall color, original
furniture configuration, original box springs on the floor.

Circa about a year ago...Meijer mass-produced art, awesome but broken thrift-
store lamp, college mirror, gold dresser hardware. Oh! And new blue walls.

Also about a year ago...honey-colored oak cupboard doors, broken
nightstand, but finally a bed frame! And clean socks on the bed.

Compare those to these more recent pictures, which feature a few new purchases - lamps, bedside tables, curtains, and a new mirror. Actually, you might not even notice all the little changes we've made, so I'll try to point them out. God, I'm so helpful.

Still waiting to paint that honey door, but there's a new furniture configuration, at least,
along with a new brushed-nickel doorknob. Not that you can tell from this picture.

New mirror (actually hanging on the wall!), repurposed lamp with non-ripped
lampshade, framed fabric because Pinterest or something? (those need to GO), 
and spray-painted dresser hardware, all located where the bed was.

Cupboard and closet doors that I painted and added moulding/new hardware
to - and the insides are all fancied up, too. A post for another day. :)

New curtains and curtain rods, winter duvet cover, actual stuff hanging on walls. Which
you will not find anywhere else in my house, due to utter laziness and indecisiveness.

Aaaand the bare, bare wall.

It was that bare, bare wall that was getting to me. We finally had (non-broken!) nightstands on both sides of the bed, and photos on the adjacent wall, but I couldn't figure out what to do with the huge expanse of wall behind the bed. It extends all the way to the door, and it was bland and boring.


I tried out some floating shelves, but I couldn't find any sturdy ones, and I just wasn't loving them. I thought about hanging more art there, but I liked where the wedding photos were situated, and I thought it would be weird (and make the room off-balance) to hang more rectangular art above the bed. Of course, Pinterest is always there to remedy situations like this. And to create new situations that need to be remedied, but whatevs. Finally, finally, I found some fab Pinspiration (yep. I used that word) one day:

Loved it! And the best part was, we have all the materials necessary to do this already...i.e., no money needed to be spent. NO SPENDING MONEY MAKE CHEAP FRUGAL CATHY HEART HAPPY.

We purchased ten krillion strands of white Christmas lights for our wedding (on sale...with a coupon...SNAP), so I gathered up four of those. The previous owners gifted us the sheer white curtains (can you spot their original homes in the purple room?) and the gold ceiling hooks (originally hanging ALL OVER OUR GODDAMN KITCHEN CUPBOARDS FOR MUGS COFFEE CUPS). I had leftover fishing line, also from the wedding, and white spray primer from...what? Oh, yeah, spray painting the dresser hardware. I figured I could get away with just priming the hooks, since the primer is white (to help them blend in with the ceiling), and I didn't have any white spray paint...so the primer would kinda have to do.

So I had all the materials - I had the inspiration picture - aaaand it all fizzled out there. I gathered everything up in late December, while I was on holiday break from work, but it never came together. Luckily, I contracted a freaky stomach virus on Tuesday night that kept me home from work on Wednesday, so I had plenty of time (in between testing out our new addition...glad to say it performed beautifully) to mess around with random Pinterest projects. Well, project, anyway. Projects would be overstating it.

Started out with the breakfast of tummy virus champions...

...and got to work. I don't usually use power tools when I'm home alone - or ever, until very recently, when I built our new master closet shelves - but all I needed to do for this was drill some small starter holes in the ceiling so I could screw in the hooks.

That was easy enough. Next step was stringing the two sheer white curtains from fishing line between two hooks on either side of the bed.

It was really hard to pull the fishing line taut, and I didn't like the curtains drooping so low. It actually doesn't look too bad in that picture, but in real life, I wasn't digging it. I knew I was going to need another hook in the middle to help string the Christmas lights, so I screwed that one in and tried again with the curtains.

Still not loving it, but my friend !Rachel called around this point to regal me with tales of her recently broken femur (shudder), and I kind of forgot about the droopiness issue whilst listening to how she wrapped her leg around a tree - and whilst ironing the curtains, which were super wrinkly, and priming the ceiling hooks. Then I left for my bimonthly MSW supervision, which was fantastic, as usual...minus my spinning head and rumbling innards. Exhausted upon returning home, the project didn't get touched until I got back from work tonight.


Sometimes, though, you need to let a project marinate in order to work out all the kinks. Before today, I had no idea how I was going to make the droopy curtains resemble my Pinspiration pic in any way, but I stopped thinking (for once, and probably just due to extreme virus-induced calorie deficiency) and got working. ...Also, my new faucet for the downstairs bathroom arrived today, and the directions were beyond intimidating. Tackling this project made me feel productive, even though I was only, in reality, procrastinating. Anyway, in a matter of five minutes, I pre-tied knots in the fishing line and angled the ceiling hook so I could loop it on without having to pull the line taut, which worked like a dream. Then I hooked the Christmas lights on, and - voila!

Loving it! Somewhere I have an extension cord with a switch on it so we could, theoretically, turn the lights on and off without having to get out of bed. The outlet is by the floor on the wall-side of the bed, which is CLEARLY much too far to manage. In the meantime, though, this - what do I even call this? This configuration? This contraption? Whatever it is, it provides enough light to read by, and Christmas lights just make me happy. And J.J. has deemed it "decidedly non-dormy," despite his initial fears that he would start having freshman-year flashbacks if we were to hang Christmas lights anywhere except on a Christmas tree. Bam! Success.