We did it! After 2 years, 4 months and 14 days … we don’t sleep on the floor anymore!
Side note: For everyone asking about cleaning the new ceiling fan, I’ve officially done it. Once the bed frame was all assembled I took a feather duster type of thing to the paddles on the ceiling fan and it worked great. We sanded down the floors after we installed the fan, poor planning, I know, so it had gotten pretty dirty pretty quickly. I dusted it all off and then swept up the floor before we brought the mattress in. The plan is to try to remember to clean the fan when I wash the sheets because I vacuum our mattress (Is that weird?) so I can dust the fan, let the dust settle and vacuum/sweep it up from there. We’ll see how it goes.
We did have a luxurious little stint of sleeping in our guest bedroom bed while we had the master all tore up, but there is something magical about settling into our very own room … with a bed.
The bed frame we’ve actually had for a long time. I would say we bought the headboard probably 14 years ago when we were living in Carmel, CA, and I’m pretty sure we bought it from furniture.com … you know, back in the day when all of the urls were short and sweet like that. Who knows if the same people even own that url now. But then in a stroke of luck a few years later, on clearance at a Pier 1 in Indianapolis, IN we saw the matching foot board and bought it. The side rails are 2 x 6s that I just kind of Jerry rigged together back in the day. All of the pieces have just been hanging around here getting in the way waiting for their time to shine since we moved down.
I was just going to toss it back together and get it into the room as is, so I can move ahead with the “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” theme that is in my brain. But it turns out Joel wasn’t real fond of that strategy. So I put out a call for help on Instagram and Facebook to see what people thought we should do to update the look. I was torn between paint or stain and there were some really fun ideas tossed around like a paint/stain stripe combo and even upholstering the center part of the headboard.
I think where I was getting hung up was that I had an aqua color in my head, because we have a lot of shades of that color lying around left over from the bathroom door and the bedroom ceiling. But with a lot of encouragement from everyone it was easy to settle on a whitewashed/driftwoody look.
I am the sloppiest, laziest, least perfect white washer I know. I literally just put some water in a tupperware container, slap some paint on the piece and then follow with a water-soaked brush (the same paint brush, of course) to first create an almost grayish coat (even though I’m using white paint) all over.
By the time I’m done with the piece it is pretty much dry so then I just dab the very tip of the paint brush in the white paint and create a little bit of a second layer of streaky paint. You really can’t do it wrong.
And it took it from the “I should be in a mountain lodge” look it had to the “I belong here in a beach house” vibe we’re going for around here. And it didn’t cost a penny since I reused the same old 2 x 6s for the side rails and used semi-gloss white paint we already had (we use off-the-shelf Behr White for all of our trim in the house).
As for the bed frame assembly I followed the same steps I took when I made the wood bed frame for the guest bedroom. But I mostly avoided all of these things this time around. 
It would have been helpful to have an extra set of hands for this part, but since I didn’t I attached the side rails on one side to the headboard and foot board through pocket holes I drilled with a Kreg Jig and then used wood scraps to prop up the mattress support part of the frame to my desired height and got that all in place.
When I attached the side rails to the other side, one pocket hole at each end was blocked by the 2 x 4 frame, so if you have an extra set of hands you may want to attach all side rails first and then slide the mattress support piece into place.
I used 2 1/2″ screws for everything and the mattress support is secured to the headboard, foot board and all along both side rails.
Any complaints about my lack of appropriate work shoes can be directed to Olivia Pope, she is handling all of my scandalous behavior these days. 
I’m busy feeling like a grown up in our master bedroom.
I don’t think the night stands are right, but they’re what we have so I’m not worried about it. Maybe they’ll get painted, or revamped, or replaced with some awesome street find. But for now they work just great.
And Joel’s only complaint about sleeping in the guest bedroom (he never had one complaint about sleeping on a mattress on the floor for over 2 years, mind you) was that he didn’t have a nightstand. I’m pretty sure he could care less about the fact that the shade of white doesn’t really go with the shade of white on the newly revamped bed frame.
But I kinda like how they help camouflage the fact that our curtains are a good 8 inches too short. So project lengthen-the-curtains might have just plummeted down the priority list as well.
‘Cause hey, Christmas is coming, and there isn’t anything I can do to stop it.
The paddles are made of canvas with light wood accents and the base is wrapped in rope. I mean perfect, right, for a coastal/nautical/beachy vibe. The light housing looks like something you would find on a boat or dock and it takes a regular, medium base, bulb … which I love. So I used one of my new Cree bulbs.
