A Bedroom Refresh With Tide Hill Home

It has been a dreary and snowless winter here in Connecticut this season. It seems like everything about the inside of my home is dreary too, especially my bedroom, which is a loft in our tiny apartment that I nicknamed “the tower.” A big part of our simple living journey has evolved around our move a couple years ago to our much smaller apartment. Living in a tiny space is not always easy. Thankfully, having the loft for our bedroom has made the transition much easier for us. It’s not always simple because we don’t have a lot of space to store things and Matthew is a big guy and he does not like feeling confined in tight spaces. Having a cathedral ceiling has made the small space feel so much larger than it really is.

With the holidays a long gone memory and the decorations back in their boxes, I needed a bedroom refresh. Spring still feels so far away. My new Tide Hill Home Nantucket double throw blanket arrived in the mail just as I started coming up with my designs and it was both the motivation and the inspiration I needed for this big overhaul. The light soft grey was a perfect starting point to draw inspiration from. I really wanted to brighten our room and add comfort, both of which the Nantucket throw (linked here) blanket has in spades. My goal was to clean, organize, and redecorate my space on a budget and to use what I already own to add a few personal touches.

My goals for the bedroom refresh:

• To declutter everything.
• Update our bedding and add comfort.
• The bed is already the focal point, so I want to dress it up.
• Fix our broken bedside lamp.
• Set up my new alarm clock to wake me up with music in the morning.
• Add some plants.
• Use what I already have to decorate the space.

The first order of business was to clean my room. It sounds so childish saying it like that, but it’s so true. I’ve been feeling very down the past several months and my room certainly reflected that. I believe that many of us can identify with that. Clothes, books, papers, and random things on every single surface. My outer world was just as disorganized as my inner world. I needed to fix that. My husband has also been sick for the past couple months. We’re not quite sure what it is, maybe some really bad allergies or a cold that won’t quit. Regardless, we’ve both been very lax with our cleaning and clothes and papers were piling up.

Instead of being harsh on myself, I decided to practice self compassion. I’ve been messy because I’ve been having a rough time and with that comes fatigue and low energy and motivation. That’s ok. No one is perfect and if you’re going to practice self compassion it better start with where you are right now. We’re all in different parts of our journeys. I’m going to show you a few real photos, even though I’m so embarrassed to, because I feel that it’s the honest way to share my before and afters for this post. To be fair, half of this mess is also my husband’s, but he has been very sick this season so I’m giving him a pass and he is working full-time while also going to school full-time. Still, we have to make our home more of a priority. That’s a big goal for us this season. Perhaps the best way of showing self-love is starting with a clean home to live in.

I promise, our default setting is not typically “slob” and I am ashamed about how far I let this room get out of control. But I have to be real with you because this is why I needed the room refresh more than anything. I thought about skipping this part altogether, but in an effort to be completely honest, I lay it all out for you. So let me just go and hide while you look at these awfully messy before photos, unmade bed and all…

My dresser and a packed suitcase from our last trip.

My “desk” and the floor near Matthew’s side of the bed. Matthew’s dresser is covered in clothes and text books.

My sad looking nightstand.

Ok, time to let all that shame, embarrassment, sadness, depression, and exhaustion go and welcome in the new!

Much better!

I spent quite a few hours sorting clothing, books, and random things for donation, rubbish, and putting away. At the end I did have a decent sized box for Goodwill and so did Matthew.

The decluttering process took the most amount of time, but once that was complete I was ready to decorate and rearrange. The decluttering stage took the most amount of time. I had to go through every item one by one. It felt so good to get it all done though!

I thought about rearranging furniture, but how it is set up now is the best use of our space. After decluttering, my first order of business was to update the bed. Our mattress is starting to get up there in age, but I don’t want to buy a new one until we have a house so for now I made it comfier by adding a mattress pad. As much as I love foam mattress pads, they’re awful for the environment and for our own health so I opted for a cotton fabric cover and pad instead. It protects the mattress and adds an extra layer of comfiness to our mattress.

I also updated our pillows to ones that are less firm as our pillows were giving us some neck strain. My favorite part about the bed update is our new linen duvet cover. Duvet covers can be so expensive, but this one was fairly reasonable from Magnolia Home at Target. Our current cover was a few years old and looking worse for wear. This one adds some brightness to the room.

And the blanket on top; our new Tide Hill Home Nantucket throw. It’s super cozy and it actually has a really good weight to it, making it the perfect layer for the cold winter months. You can find this over-sized double throw blanket here at this link; inspired by the textured colors of Nantucket, this blanket comes in this lovely shade of grey, blue, and green. All the shades are beautiful, but the cobblestone grey is my personal favorite. The good news is that it is currently 30% off! It has become the highlight of our room.

With the floor finally clean and wide open with space, I made myself a meditation area for my morning and evening mediation. You can see my little meditation space between my bed and the window here with this post.

I also brought up this 5×7 rug from our living room and decided to use it up here. This is a rug I bought almost two years ago and although it looked cute in our living room, it was also made the room look very busy. I thought the off-white and light grey would match perfectly with our new Tide Hill Home Nantucket throw blanket and add another layer of coziness to our bedroom.

As much as I would love to get a vintage matching set of dressers for us, we’re rocking what we have right now until we have a house one day. My dresser is from Ikea and my husband’s was a gift from his sister when we moved to Maryland so many years ago. I freshened up the dressers by cleaning them with method natural wood cleaner, and added some new photos of us. I’ve already had the old 1940s lamp from my mother’s home and the jewelry box.

This wooden hand carved elephant is from my trip to Bali. I now proudly display it on my dresser.

This old mirror was once my Nana’s. It was hanging in her bedroom above her dresser for over thirty years and now it hangs in my bedroom, reflecting the little window light that we get in the mornings.

Our small living room was so crowded because it is the everything room in our apartment, so I also moved our record player upstairs a few months ago. Instead of going with dark furniture like I typically do, I ordered this white record stand to fit in this little corner. All of our records fit perfectly and it’s great because the sound travels down from the loft so we can listen anywhere in our apartment. It is nice to finally have a music center in our home. One day I would prefer my bedroom to be just a bedroom and not also a music library and home office, but for now it really works. Matthew gave me this Crosley record player for Christmas when I was a junior in college. I had a bunch of old records, but no turntable to play them with. It has gotten quite a bit of use and I still adore it today.

I’m also going to finally frame our wedding painting and hang it up! Before I was waiting because I thought we would be moving, but now that I know that we’re staying another year (or maybe two) I figured it was worth the hole in the wall. For now, it is still resting on my dresser because I don’t want to risk bringing it outside with the way the weather has been. But soon this will be hanging happily on our bedroom wall.

Proudly displaying this old rotary phone from my mother’s bedroom as a teen. I’ve had this thing forever. It still actually works, but a few years ago Connecticut went digital and shut off the ability to connect calls dialed by rotary, which is sad because this was going to be my office phone one day. I think its a cute touch though.

The nightstands had to be cleared and dusted. I put away my large pile of books and found this cute basket at Target to store my extra magazines and paperbacks.

My new alarm clock finally has my alarm set to my favorite song to wake up to; Dawn by Marianelli from the movie Pride and Prejudice. It is the absolute best morning wake up song.

We finally fixed this broken lamp for Matthew’s nightstand.

Perhaps the second biggest change in our bedroom was adding this Majesty Palm plant from Home Depot. I found this large grass basket on Amazon for about $9 and the plant itself was just under $20. Matthew and I have wanted some bigger plants for a while, but our cat Madeleine can be a plant eater so most plants were too toxic for us to risk. The majesty palm is cat safe and good thing too because Madeleine has already started climbing the walls (literally) to chew it.

I’m also very happy with my “home office.” My sewing machine and important documents fit well in this white rope basket and my meditation cushion fits perfectly over it to hide the clutter. Under the desk I keep a small basket to hold my business cards, brochures, and hard drives. My “desk” is an old hand-me-down vanity table with a stool. The vanity mirror is tucked away in the closet under the stairs.

This room divider is from Ikea. I bought it so many years ago and although Matthew isn’t a big fan of it and it takes up some space, I truly love the look it gives the room and I use it to hang my outfits on.

I covered the ugly green plastic shades a few months back with this mini curtain and tension rod from Target. I also cleared out the window sill for less clutter and more clarity.

Overall, I’m very happy with how our bedroom refresh turned out. A special thank you to Tide Hill Home for the beautiful Nantucket throw, which was the perfect inspiration for our entire room redo. I’m looking forward to transitioning this new refresh and blanket into Spring.