This is the second week of the Fall 2022 One Room Challenge. Thank you so much for visiting!
All the guest participant links can be found on the One Room Challenge blog! You can also visit the week 2 link up page directly here. This is an awesome event where everyone supports each other and has a great time working towards their own goals in these 8 weeks, so I hope you check out lots of participants!
I realized in the last post that I didn’t actually put in a “before” picture of the Murphy bed. We’re starting on the Murphy bed this week though, so it’s the perfect time! Also, I want to say that it’s less messy in here currently than in the before picture, but our new front porch furniture just showed up and we started assembling it so it’s somehow even more chaotic. It’s all good though – it means the after reveal will be even more of a change!
Behold, our guest room Murphy bed! It’s a queen size, which is really nice, and it conveyed when we bought the house.
We had a Murphy bed in our previous house with bookshelves on each side, but it was a kind of sun-bleached gray or brown so it felt a bit lighter within the room even with the shelves. It actually took me a while to figure out how I wanted to integrate this Murphy bed into the room without adding a lot of bulk on the sides.For the gym aspect of the room, I felt like our usual palette of moody jewel tones might not be the energetic pop I was looking for. It felt like a good opportunity to try something a bit out of our comfort zone with color. I was thinking of something warm and soft, a muted orange or peach that gave that first morning light feeling.
Have I mentioned that I am the biggest fan of peel-and-stick paint samples? These are from Samplize, but Clare is where I was originally introduced to these time-saving reusable samples.
Our contenders after whittling down the original samples were: Benjamin Moore: Sherwin-Williams:Speaking of morning light, we put these samples up fairly early in our planning process, and looked at them in all kinds of different times of day and angles of the room. I didn’t feel like I had as much intuition with these colors because of them being in a palette I haven’t used much, so I wanted to really get a feel for them.
Our winning color ended up being Rejuvenate by Sherwin-Williams (and how perfect is that paint color name for a gym and guest space!). We loved how it went with the existing warm gray in the room, giving a fresh burst of brightness without either color taking over the other. And yes, we’re only painting part of the room, but that’s a project for a later week.
Now that we had picked our main accent color, I started brainstorming options for tying in the dark walnut (almost espresso) Murphy bed. Matt was actually the one who suggested wallpaper, and a couple Photoshop trial mockups later, I agreed that would be a good direction to go. The varied colors and lines within a wallpaper pattern would help break up the shape of the Murphy bed, and honestly, I love any chance to add wallpaper!
The two directions I found for wallpaper – one a bit lighter and more delicate in the design, and one bolder in color and linework.
While it’s not an Art Deco geometric print, I felt like the Vintage Botanical Wildflowers Floral Peel and Stick wallpaper from KOKOARTSHOP on Etsy really matched the feeling I wanted for this space. It has bold punches of color like teal and orange, but the white background keeps it balanced overall. The fine linework and botanical pattern give an elegant feel and provide a good contrast to the many heavy straight lines that we already have in this space. We’ll be installing this in an upcoming week too!One place I love adding a touch of character in a room is by changing out hardware. In this case – I actually wasn’t sure if we could change the hardware out on this Murphy bed! After a lot of measuring and taking a look at the construction, we found out that it’s actually pretty feasible, so hardware shopping I went.
Installing the handles was not too tricky of a process, as you can see here. We opened up the Murphy bed, lifted up the mattress, and there are holes in the mattress support you can use to access the screws holding the handles on. I would definitely recommend having two people for installing the new handles, as it’s not a difficult process but being able to reach both sides of the Murphy bed at once to hold the new handles in place and screw them in from the other side is much easier with two people. Overall, it was a really quick update with a major impact – the only thing we had to adjust was removing some of the washers that had been used for the existing handles to fine-tune how the handles fit against the Murphy bed.
I do mean a major impact! These Solid Satin Brass “Texture No. 2” Knurled Drawer Pulls from ForgeHardwareStudio on Etsy are 17-5/8″ long! I love how the warm brass really transforms this piece, and the knurled texture on the pulls takes it a step up. So, if you have a Murphy bed with handles you never thought about changing even though you’re not their biggest fan – it’s worth the investigation! Already this feels more like an intentional design choice within the room rather than something we’re working around.
The Jeweled Nest 