Finally - Sanctuary

This is a post I've been wanting to write for a long time, but it keeps escaping me, probably because I wanted to include pictures (how dumb is that a reason for not writing a post?).

We have a lovely house with an open floor plan and rooms that flow into one another.  We have tons of windows and lots of natural light.  The rooms are decent sized, and some are just downright monstrously huge.  One of those rooms is our bedroom.  The original floor plan called for a bedroom and a sitting room with a wall separating the majority of the two rooms.  When we toured one of the houses in the neighborhood with the same floor plan, that wall really seemed to dissect the two rooms and make them seem small.  Our bright idea was to remove the wall and make the two rooms one larger room.

Great except that with the builder's off-white paint and this huge open space, the room was cold and uninviting.  After a couple of years, it became my least favorite room. 

Bit by bit, we've painted the other rooms, hung curtains, and decorated, and much of the house has come together.  Except the bedroom.  I never knew what I wanted to do with it, and I remained unhappy with it.

One day back in April, we were shopping at Potomac Mills, and I saw a picture at Kirkland's.  For some time, I had thought about heavy burgundy curtains, but I had no idea what color I would paint the walls.  Brown didn't sound like fun, and with burgundy curtains, I couldn't do red walls or the room would look as if it were bleeding.  But when I saw this picture, then it all became clear.  I could do a brown, a kind of bronze-brown color.   I had this image in my mind -  I call it  French Whorehouse or Bordello-ish. (I've since had an interior designer tell me that style is called heavy Baroque.  Heavy Baroque it is.)  And no, this has nothing to do with my new company.

We made a stop at Linens 'N' Things, and I picked out a set of curtains to bring home to see if I liked.  They were definitely red/burgundy, and they had nice little tassels on them.  :-)

Now it was time to find the paint.  We went to Lowe's, and Chris helped me find a nice brown.  I was thinking one of their cool textured paints in which you add sand or granite flecks to the paint, but Chris found this really cool paint color that just shimmered.  It was two different paints, but the associate assured us that one coat of each would cover.

We started painting before we went to the Bahamas, and we left on vacation with the room taped, sheet cloths over the furniture too heavy to move, and all that heavy furniture shoved to the middle of the room.  The T.V. cabinet was inches from the foot of our bed, but for a couple of weeks, the change was kind of nice.

We finished painting the room, and it was lovely. (Um, it was two coats of the base, and three coats of the second paint.  Not quite the one coat each promised us by the sales associate, but oh well.)  We decided that after six years of the furniture in one place, we should think about moving things around.  The bed went to another wall (which meant I could see the fireplace from the bed, something I couldn't do with the bed directly across from the fireplace), and we brought up a red chair from the basement (which then meant Chris could get a recliner for the basement.  He wasn't complaining.).

We liked the curtains from Linens 'N' Things, and so I ordered more.  We went to Target to find drapery hardware, and we found two we liked.  We brought them home to see which one we liked better, and made our decision.  However, in the time we had bought the two different rods, the one we liked went on sale, which was good, but it meant that the rods were on backorder, and it took us several weeks to get all the rods we needed.

The bedroom was finished, but there was an empty space in the corner.  In keeping with the heavy Baroque theme, we bought a chaise, and it filled the space nicely.  Other than the little bistro table I bought for next to the red chair, it's the only new furniture we bought.  Everything else we already had, either in the bedroom, or from other places in the house.  It came together nicely, I think.

What's the point of all this?  Well, one thing I didn't realize when I did this room was how much of a sanctuary it creates for me.  Sure, one portion of this room is my creative space (remember DCS?), and it's where I work on Write Well University.  However, it's also become a comfort space for me.  I read, cross-stitch (when I can), listen to music, watch 80s videos, and anything else that involves just BEing.  But it's more than the things I can do (or be) in the room; I walk in, and sounds and life are instantly muted.  Now, that's probably because the thick curtains absorb sound, but there's an immediate emotional reaction.  My stress level recedes if I'm stressed, and if I'm happy, I become more so.  Chris and I spend most of our evenings here, and I think it's a sanctuary for him as well.

The most interesting thing about creating this sanctuary is that it coincided with all the other changes I've made this year.  It wasn't a conscious decision, but I can't help but think that it was all part of th whole journey.  I've been working on BEing and creating my ideal life.  Why shouldn't my bedroom be that ideal space to help create that ideal life as well as a place I can BE?

What is your sanctuary?  What have you had to do (decorate, paint, create, buy) to make it your sanctuary?  What do you do in your sanctuary?

Comments

[Sara in Austin]

Very nicely done! I'm looking for ideas for my own bedroom in the same sort of feel -- "Heavy Baroque" will give me some more ways to search out inspiration!