Master Bedroom: Paint & Curtains a-go-go

The biggest projects I have personally completed thus far have been painting the master bedroom and hanging new curtains. You saw a little peek at the curtain hanging work in this post, and you might even have noticed the new curtains if you were especially eagle-eyed reading the last post, but let's get some beauty shots up here so we can see the changes in full.

Caveats: a) I still need to paint the HVAC registers. I discovered during this project that the supply registers are somehow impossible to remove from the wall, so those will get painted in place, obviously with care taken to not let paint drip into our ducts. The registers are covered in a thick layer of the previous paint, as are all of the outlets- sockets and all. So, big thanks to whoever did that. Your taste in paint is weird. I'm just going to use white to cover the registers.

b) The drapes look rumply. My mom helped us get them really nice looking on the day we hung them with her patented damp-towel-in-the-dryer trick, but then we took them down to paint and they got all wrinkled. Don't ask me why I haven't just repeated the dryer thing. I'll get to it.

To review: Here's before. Blech. 

But here's after, prettyyyyyyy. This paint color is Behr Valley Mist, which can look blue or green or gray depending on the light. Mostly blue. And the curtains are these ones from Target, which I'd actually been eyeing and were then miraculously on sale the day we needed them. They only had the 84" length in the store but if I were doing it over I'd order the 95" ones and hang them higher, 'cause that's one of those tricks they tell you. Also, they only make them in 54" widths. I'd read that you're supposed to get a total drapery width of two to two and a half times the width of the window so they don't look too weird when you pull them shut, and initially I was searching everywhere for extra wide curtains, until it occurred to me that I could just hang two panels on each side of this window. So that's what we did. They're not seamed together or anything, and it's working just fine. But four panels for this window, plus two for the other corner = still not cheap. Glad they were on sale. 

Here's before from another angle. 

And after, aaahhh betterrrrr. My mom and I also lucked out by finding curtain rods on super sale at JoAnn when we weren't even looking for them there. 

One last big shot. 

Here's a close-up of the texture of the curtains. This is where the rumply-ness really shows. Sorry, Mom! I'll fix it!

One last note: Eric's not the type who likes to wake with the sun, so it was important to him that the new drapes do a pretty decent job of blocking out light. Anything would have been an improvement over the original sheers, but these make it really dark, for reals. And the grommet tops also make it easier to yank them open and closed haphazardly, so hopefully we won't have any repeats of the original incident which led us to need new curtains in the first place. Not that it was a bad thing. Those sheers were fug.