Before…
I think “depressing” is a good description…
In 2020 I had the amazing luck of winning the $5000 “Room Makeover” sweepstakes from Havenly & The Container Store, which came with $2500 to spend at each company, and the help of an Interior Designer from Havenly to assist me in creating the room of my dreams! Jumping up and down with joy, I knew, instantaneously, that I would use the Havenly windfall to design The Glam Bedroom of My Wildest Dreams, because, in the 17 years (at that point) since we created and opened our home as the historic inn, the Elkhorn Inn & Theatre, in 2003, Dan and I had never had a nice bedroom of our very own! All our time and money went into my designing and decorating the Inn’s 14 Guest Rooms, and other guest spaces in our building, and, after all those years, we were still sleeping in what I politely referred to as The Bedroom From Hell. It started out okay, in 2003, with a Queen Sleigh Bed we bought at Big Lots, but it rapidly became simply a place to crash, filled with junk that didn’t fit anywhere else, and it was dark, and, frankly, depressing. Totally obsessed with the seemingly endless possibilities of $2500, I delightedly pored over the Havenly website, & perused the portfolios of their many designers and their various styles. I chose Marie, an Interior Designer in Paris, no less, who “got” my crazy (read: “eclectic”) taste! I decided I wanted an over-the-top Glam Bedroom that would be both sexy and fun, and a space Totally different from anything else in our building! The historic “Coal Heritage Trail” Elkhorn Inn that is also our home was built in 1922 as the Empire Coal & Coke Company’s Miner’s Club House, and was designed by the region’s preeminent architect, the European-schooled Alex Mahood, in the style of an Italian palace, with a grand archway and balcony out front. When we bought it in 2002, saved it from demolition, and restored it, I decorated much of it with our antiques & period furnishings dating from when the building was in its hey-day in the 1930s: the guest rooms feature vintage quilts, Italian tole lighting fixtures, and 1930s furniture; Dan laid marble on the ground floor, & I had drapes made from Italian damask. This bedroom, however, was going to be Something Completely Different and Just For Me- and Dan was fine with that!
I began saving photos of all the wild and fabulous things I loved from dozens of design and decor sites, & creating pin-boards of my “vision” for The Bedroom in my Havenly account. I sent Marie photos of the room as it was, and drawings with the room’s measurements, and based on my messages & pin-boards, Marie worked up and sent me a number of designer sketches for the proposed bedroom- two are posted above. Together we decided on a black, silver, & gray color scheme for the room, with pale pink as the accent color, and glass, mirrored furniture, & I shared with her my love of sexy stuff like feathers, velvet, silk and fur… Wayfair is one of the main stores that Havenly is affiliated with, and I was able to find the perfect mirrored chest of drawers and matching bedside tables there, to start. $2500 may sound like a lot of money, but you’d be surprised how fast you can whip through it, especially when you have “champagne taste”, LOL! To save some money, I wanted to use a few things we had that I felt would work in the new bedroom, including our Queen Sleigh Bed, and its really good, Hilton Hotel mattress, a small, silver “faux bois” side table, a classic, vintage wing chair, and the grey velvet drapes, and Nicole Miller & Tahari bed linens I’d bought at TJ Maxx. I decided I’d silver-leaf the dark, wood Sleigh Bed, and anything else that needed it, and I ordered the mirrored dresser and matching bedside tables, a fireplace-style room heater, and 2 fabulous giraffe lamps from Wayfair through Havenly. I ordered the high-heat silver spray paint for the “fireplace” heater from Home Depot online, and Amaco silver-leaf paint for the bed & lamps on eBay. I finally found the ostrich feather chandelier of my fantasies on alibaba, and ordered it, too. Hubby Dan then ordered the thick, plush dark grey carpet from Lowe’s, with professional installation, so it would be Just Perfect, and got the pale gray wall paint & darker semi-gloss I’d selected for the walls & ceiling, doors & woodwork. He removed everything from the bedroom, painted the ceiling, walls, and woodwork, and got the room ready for the carpet to be installed, and the furniture to arrive… and then “life happened”, as the expression goes…
The first thing that went wrong was courtesy of Lowe’s, and it was Huge. Instead of installing the carpet in Feb. 2021, as we’d paid for and scheduled, they delayed us repeatedly for many weeks, and when the mirrored furniture, fireplace heater, and lamps arrived from Wayfair, in their giant, 350+ lb. boxes, they couldn’t be taken up to the bedroom, because there was no carpet there yet, so they sat in the foyer by the door… for many, many months. (We were, frankly, very lucky that the delivery men at least brought the boxes inside- they could have dumped them in our parking lot in the rain and skedaddled…)
The furniture arrived… and had no place to go!
After weeks of delays, phone calls, & emails to Lowe’s CEO and others, Lowe’s delivery people finally turned up with the 300+ lb. rolls of carpet and under-padding in mid-May, but instead of installing it, as we’d paid for and scheduled, they literally dumped it in our living room hallway & left. We continued to email Lowe’s CEO, trying desperately to get them to install the carpet. The bottom line was that in July of 2021 they finally refunded us the money we’d paid for the installation, and that was it- we had giant rolls of carpet and padding taking up the entire length of our foyer for months, and we were on our own. Living in the “boonies” of Extremely Rural southern West Virginia, it’s very hard to find anyone to hire to do anything, which is why we’d paid for Lowe’s supposedly professional installation. Dan had literally done Everything since 2002: he totally restored our entire historic, 1922 building, and did all the maintenance, as well. Among other things, he took 5′ of mud out of our basement with a shovel and installed our new water boilers there, brought the building’s electric and plumbing up to code, installed 240 sheets of drywall, the marble flooring on the first floor, laminate flooring on the 2nd and 3rd floors, and tile flooring in the kitchen, installed all the woodwork and trim and appliances and lighting and furnishings, re-built the fireplace and mantle, literally created a kitchen and bathrooms, replaced missing doors (the building was boarded-up and door-less when we bought it), repaired the 1922 windows (we have 66 of them), re-installed the giant, 1922 radiators that had been moved by ransackers to the front porch, sealed brick and concrete, and did all the paint, plaster work, etc. And he won the Coal Heritage Trail Preservation Award from American ByWays for it, and we were featured on HGTV- twice. (The only thing he didn’t do was the roof, as I wouldn’t let him up there; we hired professional roofers to do that). The vast majority of our spending since 2002 was at Lowe’s, and we’d literally spent a fortune there, which made their treatment of us over the carpet installation even more upsetting. With my professional background in art & design (I went to The Cooper Union, and studied in Italy, as well), I designed the Inn, and eBayed my heart out to get champagne decor results on our beer bootstrap budget, but Dan actually, physically, made it happen, with sheer Sweat Equity! But this carpet issue wasn’t a one-man job- not to mention that Dan was 75 at the time and no kid. There was no way for the two of us to even lift the roll of carpet off the floor, much less tote it up 2 flights of stairs and install it. After months of searching, we were finally and truly blessed to find a professional carpet installation man through Raleigh Tile in Beckley, WV, (where we’d bought our beautiful marble flooring in 2003), and, together with Dan, he managed to get the carpet up to the bedroom, and did a beautiful job of installing it professionally. Months later we finally found 3 strong, good guys with a dolly to cart the 350+ lb. boxes of mirrored bedroom furniture, the fireplace heater, and lamps up there… while I prayed- and I do mean Prayed- that nothing was damaged, as the “window of return” had Long since closed. By another miracle everything was fine, and the shiny, mirrored furniture was now set up smartly on the thick, plush carpet! YAY! And it was now 2023. LOL
Then came The Chandelier Fiasco. As I noted above, I’d happily found my dream ostrich feather chandelier- that would be the focal point of the room- on alibaba, from a supplier in China. I corresponded with the seller through alibaba before I ordered it, and made Absolutely Sure that it was Absolutely Right and would Absolutely Work. And when it arrived we discovered that it was a total POS- a non-functional, feather-embellished doorstop. And a very expensive, non-functional, feather-embellished doorstop, at that. Dan, who, with his US Army-honed skill-set, can basically do Anything, worked and worked on it, but it was pointless. I was literally in tears, because that chandelier was set to be the centerpiece around which Marie and I had designed the entire room, and it was a total piece of garbage. I was about to throw it in the trash in sheer despair, when Dan made one last stab at it: he took the whole chandelier apart on the dining room table and rewired it from scratch. It took weeks, and we had to find new bulbs that would work in it, but he made it so! He sprayed it silver, and then managed to actually get it hung & working, which was another fiasco that took days, because our delightful, historic building has archaic infrastructure which makes Everything a fiasco! But finally it was up, and working, & I stuck the ostrich feathers in their little holders and rejoiced! Then came the installation of the Heater From Hell. It looked so cute and simple on the Wayfair website: you just anchor it to the wall with a couple of screws and plug it in! Not in our 1922 building you don’t. In our building, you drill into an outside wall and the brick literally crumbles into dust, leaving giant, gaping holes in the wall. But Dan again saved the day- and my decorator dreams- finally managing to secure the heater to the wall AND get it working! And he sprayed it silver, too! And then he rolled his eyes and painted the Sleigh Bed & Giraffe Lamps with silver leaf, and everything, literally, gleamed! But then I decided I wanted double curtain rods, so I could hang shot-silk drapes over the velvet ones, and be able to pull them to the sides… and that meant, yep, mounting something else on that outside wall, and another couple of weeks of drillin’ & fillin’… But we finally had the carpet, the chandelier, the heater, the double drapes, AND furniture in the room, and it had only taken 2.5 years! YAY!
I could now Decorate! This is when the fun would start! The room, as you can see from the photos, has some odd, archaic features, including textured 1922 walls, and a large, flat, framed wooden area on the wall opposite the bed that is a permanent, and non-removable, part of the wall. I decided I would mirror that area, which would make the room seem larger & brighter, reflecting light in what is a rather dark room- and I figured it would be easy, because it was wood and it was flat. (Insert the sound of sarcastic, hollow laughter here…) Because of the odd size of the rectangle, standard 12″ mirror tiles wouldn’t work, and I finally chose small, 2″ peel-and-stick, faceted, glass mirror tiles, which I ordered several cases of from amazon… and Dan glued them to the wall… and they popped right off. Why? Because the “flat” wall wasn’t flat. Trust me when I tell you that Nothing in a 1922 building is flat, or even, or square, or flush, or straight. Buildings “settle”, and in settling everything goes off kilter. You don’t notice it until you try to do something- like hang drapery rods, and discover that the windows are different heights, or a chandelier, and discover that the 1922 electric box in the ceiling is a tad different from modern ones… or install a large, fireplace-style heater and have to anchor it into a brick outside wall that crumbles when you drill into it… or lay a carpet, and discover that the floor isn’t flat, and the walls all slope at different angles, and the room isn’t square… or try to glue mirror tiles onto a wavy-gravy wall. Dan finally got the tiles to stick to the wall with some sort of magic cement, but I had to order another case of them to replace the ones that fell off and couldn’t be re-glued… at which point the lovely, cut-glass, vintage door knobs I’d scored on eBay, which, given the age of the building seemed perfect, fell off the doors- because their vintage screws weren’t long enough for our vintage doors. LOL Dan managed to fix them, too. So now I not only had carpet, lighting, and furniture in the room, I had doors that you could open & close! YAY!
By this time Marie was no longer with Havenly, (or she gave up on me, LOL), but they very nicely connected me with a new decorator, Andrea, and she helped me find several needed pieces to complete the room. A tad OCD by this point, I spent about 16 hours one night methodically searching through several thousand pieces of furniture on Wayfair, & finally found a mirrored desk that matched the other pieces to use as a dresser, and a “Hollywood” light-up makeup mirror for it, as well as a mirrored tissue box cover to tie it all together. And I started going though our art and “collectables” to find things that would be both appropriate for the decor and “spark joy” in that room. What to hang on the walls was a big issue, because I wanted to make sure they were things that would make me happy to look at, as well as work with the decor- “only good vibes here!”, as the expression goes. And I didn’t want store-bought, impersonal art that we had no connection to. The wall above the fireplace heater is the first thing you see when you walk into the room, and I wanted something special on it. I wound up making a piece of art using the oyster and other shells I’d saved from many dinners Dan & I had enjoyed on vacation. Years ago I’d fallen in love with a mirror framed in oyster shells that I’d seen in a fancy, beach resort boutique. It was over $400- and I’ve seen some as high as $1400!- but looking at it up close I realized it was simply oyster shells hot-glued to a Walmart mirror frame, and so I began saving shells every time Dan & I had oysters or mussels or clams for dinner! It became our running vacation joke for me to ask the waiter for a to-go box for our shells for “The Mirror Project”- but I learned I wasn’t the only one doing it, even at fancy, upscale restaurants! I got a glue gun at Wally World and made an oyster shell-framed mirror for one of our Inn’s guest rooms, and it was a success, and I still had a Lot of shells… So I ordered a large, shadow box display case from Jo-Ann Fabrics, silver-leafed it, and Dan removed the hinges and took the glass top off it, as I wanted it open, so you could really enjoy the 3-D texture of the shells and pearls. I filled the frame with oyster shells, and some mussel and clam shells for good measure, glued them down, and then draped strands of pink and gray pearls from our Gift Shop over the shells, creating something pretty that goes with the color scheme of the room And reminds me of a lot of fun seafood dinners! (Hanging it on that dang outside wall, however, became another Project From Hell, because Rule #1 is that Nothing in this building can be simple or easy! Over the last 20 years I have learned, the Very Hard Way, that when Dan says “it’s a 15-minute job”, that means it’s going to take 6 months and involve scaffolding…) On the wall over the black velvet-covered wing chair I hung a framed embroidery Dan and I bought in Vietnam on our Honeymoon that also brings back lovely memories- and, as it’s on an inside wall, it actually did take only 15 minutes to hang! I silver-leafed the legs of the wing chair, which I’d covered with a black, velvet slipcover, and the top of the faux bois table, upon which I set the funky little Black Crow Table Lamp I’d bought on alibaba at the same time that I purchased the feather chandelier- and this lamp actually worked! The hand-made, leather horse-head tassels for the drapes came from our Gift Shop; originally brown, I painted them with silver leaf, as well; as I couldn’t find drapery tiebacks I really liked, I’ve temporarily tied the drapes back with wide, gray velvet ribbon I got on eBay. On the fireplace mantle I put some of the small art pieces we’d collected on our travels that make me smile when I look at them: the beautiful pink ceramic cow dish is Dan’s from Alaska, made by a fellow soldier who was also a fine ceramicist, and I’d bought the black and white Murano glass dove in Italy in 1975, when I was a college student backpacking across Europe with a Railpass… We’re a couple of sentimental old pack-rats with Way too much stuff!!
And then I shopped the on-line sales, and splurged on a few, special decor items that I couldn’t get through Havenly: the feather-edged Nikki Chu mirror over the bed came from Z Gallerie, the hand-made Chinese “Tang Lady Plate” on the dresser from Wing-On-Wo in NYC, and the perfect pink velvet boudoir chair and matching storage ottoman from Tov Furniture. The adorable dog pillow on the chair came from Anthropologie, & the pom-pom bunny pillow from MacKenzie-Childs. The big, pink ostrich feathers I added to the chandelier came from etsy, and the pink Mongolian Lamb pillow, faux fur throw, aromatherapy essential oil diffuser, and “sunrise” alarm clock all came from amazon. I waited for a good sale, and got a king goose down comforter at Macy’s; the bed is Queen-sized, but a king comforter feels more luxurious, & I much prefer down to feathers, as feathers have a tendency to poke through the fabric. The fluffy, pink dog bed, and the black velvet slipcover for the wing chair came from Overstock. The two matching sets of vintage glass door knobs, down pillows, sham pillows, and pink & black satin sheets (I am glam to the core!) came from eBay– my great decorating source for over 20 years, especially for unique, vintage items, since we first created the Elkhorn Inn! ( I often window-shop the fancy stores, & then set up a “watch” on eBay for things I love but can’t afford- and I have snagged some GREAT deals that way- like a $600 Neiman Marcus chandelier for $75!) My Glam Bedroom, although “finished”, remains a work in progress, and probably always will! I would like to eventually find Just The Right Thing to hang on the wall over the dresser, I am on the look-out for drapery tie-backs that “sing” to me… and I recently scored the mirrored pillow for the bed at TJ Maxx, as it was Just Perfect and I couldn’t resist!
Although I have done a lot of interior design over the years, and won some awards for it, (“Decorating on a Dime” for my Elkhorn Inn work, for one), I learned a Lot in doing this project with Havenly! First of all, the old saying “measure twice, cut once” is no lie! Measure Everything- at least twice- before you cut anything or buy anything! In addition to room measurements, so you know if the furniture you buy will fit where it needs to, remember to measure the height of tables before you buy chairs for them. I bought almost everything for this room online, and so had to trust my computer’s pixels with regards to color, which is Not the way I would have liked to do it in a Perfect World, as you never really know if things are going to match- or clash- until you see them In Real Life… and I hate to return stuff. (I also like to buy things on sale, when I can, and they’re often “final sale”, and not returnable, so I had to be Absolutely Sure that what I bought would work…) Unless you have a deadline, like a date when guests are arriving, take your time. I am not suggesting 3 years, LOL, which was, frankly, insane, but the more time you can devote to shopping around and making inspirational design pin-boards, the better. You will keep discovering new things you’ll fall in love with, and “tweaking” your design until you get it Just Right! And you will have the time to shop the sales, & try to score deals on eBay! If you live in the “boonies” and can’t hire help when needed, it’s truly imperative to be married to- or at least living with- Handy Andy! This bedroom would Not have happened without my US Army Ret. husband’s skill-sets in wiring, restoration, and installation. And working with a professional designer was fabulous! It was a Lot of fun to collaborate with Marie, as I had never worked with a pro to design a room before, and she gave me new ideas, helped me “think outside the box”, as it were, and found things for me I never would have found without her assistance and connections. The great thing about Havenly is that they make working with a pro affordable- and they are Super-Nice, so it’s fun to work with them!
Although I had planned to complete the bedroom with the $2500 I’d won from Havenly, that didn’t happen. I wound up going way over budget, largely because of the carpet and installation expense, and “irresistible” must-haves like the decorator pillows, feather mirror and chandelier, and velvet boudoir chair and ottoman that I wound up buying on other sites… I actually used a portion of my Havenly win to buy a sofa for our living room- another re-decoration project!- & Andrea helped me find that, too! The one thing I have not yet used from my sweepstakes win is the $2500 gift card from The Container Store. My intent/hope was to use it to create The Closet Room Of My Wildest Dreams in the room that adjoins The Glam Bedroom, but I am honestly not sure that is going to happen… For the moment I am just going to enjoy my Over-The-Top Glam Bedroom that I’d wanted for 20 years, and which took me 3 years to pull together- and that I finally got, thanks to Havenly!
Please let me know in the comments what you think of it!
Have you ever worked with a decorator to design a room? Havenly makes that affordable- and fun!
