*To see the background for these projects, read part one here.
The first big decision was made and I was feeling pretty good. Turning the idea of a theme into a concrete plan, however, was a long and tricky process. Turning that plan into an actual room took even embarrassingly longer. Part two of my triumph was overcoming the infinite choices of fabrics and paints to get some color on the walls and some curtains on the windows.
1. Start with the fabric. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Sarah’s House on HGTV, you know that when decorating a room, you absolutely must start with the fabrics.
2. Visit every local fabric store trying to find the perfect fabric (one that is both adorable and affordable). If you don’t find anything, scour the internet until your eyeballs bleed and then become overwhelmed by the millions of options.
3. Create a digital image of the room so you can cut/paste pictures of different options. This will help you visualize your options. Mull over them for a few weeks, narrow your choices, and eventually pick one (even if you don’t ultimately follow it exactly).
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| Make sure you're OCD about lining up the squares of fabric on the curtains so they look as realistic as possible. These fabric samples are courtesy of fabric.com. |
4. Pull the trigger and order the fabrics. Stop second guessing or wondering if there’s a cuter fabric out there for a better price. If you do, you’ll wait too long and the main fabric you were going to order will be out of stock and you’ll have to pay more to order it from a different website (D’oh!).
5. Choose a coordinating color to paint the room. I chose gray.
6. Realize that the color you chose only slightly narrows down your actual paint options (seriously, do you know how many shades of gray there are? Trust me, there are more than fifty).
7. Talk to the really nice lady at the paint store and let her help you hone in on a shade. The color you thought you wanted (found from a cool pin about the perfect neutral colors to use in your home) will probably look too green when compared with the yellows you plan to use. Paint Lady will have the answer and even explain the differences between the aisles and aisles of paints that they offer.
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| I chose Ozark Shadows from Benjamin Moore. It's a medium gray so it's dark enough you know it's gray but not so dark it makes the room feel like a cave. I loved it! |
8. Watch a bunch of online tutorials on how to paint a room (some of these will contradict each other and they will most likely assume you are not a beginner who knows absolutely nothing about painting, so see step 9).
9. Make several calls to your sister to fill in the blanks. She will also be able to provide you the moral support necessary to purchase all the materials and actually get started painting (which, it turns out, is a lot more difficult than it is in The Sims).
10. After a few days of hard work, sit back and appreciate your masterpiece (and try not to worry about that message from your landlord telling you that the color you just used to paint the room is too dark and you need to choose a different color… but that’s a story for another time).
In part three I'll reveal the fabulous curtains I made with the new fabric! (Spoiler Alert: They pretty much look just like the curtains in the sample room pic above).
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