Poco Mountain Girl

I’m pretty excited to finally show the results of my last two weeks of work on our loft!

Our loft has doubled as an office/bedroom for the past year and a half–ever since our house was so frigid the week we returned from vacation that we pulled our bed into the loft to be a little closer to the wood stove. We liked it so much we never moved back.  🙂

I wish I had a Before picture of this room, but as far as I can see, I’ve never really photographed it–and here is probably why.  David’s desk, chair, bookshelf, and everything else that made up his office were on one side, and our mattress on the other–with a tiny walkway between the bed and wall.  We also somehow fit in a rocker/glider with an ottoman.  It was a wee bit cluttered.

When I started work on the loft, I thought I would just paint it. Here are a couple of sample colors over the original light gray. I picked Benjamin Moore’s Iron Mountain, the slightly darker shade on the left.

If you ever paint a dark shade over a light, use their Aura line. It covers bee-yoo-ti-fully. This took scarcely two coats–really just one, with lots of touch-ups in the deeply textured areas.

Starting the stairwell. Frog tape is awesome!

Here are the finished stairs–they feel dark and closed-in, and I love them.  Iron Mountain turned out to be such a great color. I drove David nuts agonizing between several very slightly different shades of gray, but it was worth it. Grays can either be a wonderful backdrop, or lifeless and ugly.  This one turned out to be a great backdrop.

David painted the top peak that hangs out over the edge while Caleb held the ladder.  I tried getting up there, but let’s just say it feels higher than it looks.  So glad he did it for me. 🙂

To my pure delight, David offered to move his office into the upstairs room where we used to sleep. I donated the glider to Caleb and pushed our bed into the center of the loft.  We bought a string of outdoor lights, a couple of rugs at World Market, and stole some furniture and plants from the living room.  At this point I thought I was finished, and was quite happy with the results. (Except for the unmade bed, of course. Cash was sleeping in on his birthday.)

I have to insert kind of a funny story here. The night I moved the bed to the middle of the room, I got up at 4 am, had my morning spoonful of yogurt (sounds weird but helps me not to crash later after breakfast) and came sauntering gleefully back to bed in pitch darkness. I dove into bed and–BAM! landed on the floor.

David woke up (everyone probably did) and thought I had fallen out of bed, hehe. He looked confused when I told him about my miscalculated dive. Like, why would you DIVE into bed? Just one of those weird things I do, I guess.

So I thought the room was about finished, but THEN I decided to push my luck a little farther, and asked David to bring home some pallets while he was at the feed store. From the beginning, I had been carrying around a crumpled flyer I got in the mail from Bed Bath & Beyond that has a page showing a bed on four pallets, and a string of lights overhead. It’s the picture that inspired me to even start this room–really I should frame that crumpled mess and hang it on the wall.

So he brought them home, then had to cut them to size, he and Caleb lugging them up and down the stairs. It took a little bit of work, but in the end they looked so good. At least, I think so–but then, I’m a pallet kind of girl.

Then another idea struck me in the middle of one night.  I got some shadowbox frames, dug through years worth of papers (sorting it all in the process–yay me!) and found three years worth of cards from David.  I put them (mostly) in order and mounted them.

And those curtains, you ask?  Weeelll….never the satisfied one (the old ones were there when we moved in), I searched around online and found these at World Market. David, ever the humoring one, drove me out to a store that had exactly two panels left. I planned to cut and hem them to fit the window frame, but hung them and loved them just like that–all long and flowy.  We can’t really close them easily, but who really cares?  It’s not like we shut our curtains much anyway.

Are you asking about that comforter now? Since you asked, that was my idea, too–one that made the very accommodating David nearly flip his lid. But only for a moment. Once he composed himself, we searched a few stores and found this at T.J. Maxx, for a fraction of the cost a department or home store would charge. It’s a queen size, but I like it on our king bed since it doesn’t have yards and yards of fabric draping to the floor. It also fits in the washer (big plus) and best of all, shows off my lovely pallet frame. I really like that the pattern is reminiscent of our woods out the window, and also goes so nicely with the bird curtains.  Besides, after ten years you get kind of tired of the same old blue blanket.

And now, I think I’m finished–at least until another big idea hits.  I’ve also done some work on my tiny bathroom on the main level, but I still have lots of plans to execute there, so I’ll save that for later.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2015 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Arty, Home Sweet Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.