I've been promising pictures of my new house for a while now, and I really wanted to share the work I've done on it with you.  However, I was waiting until I received the furniture I ordered.  I got my bedroom set on Monday and WHOA!  What a different room this is.  The bedroom started off looking like this:

This was the picture I took (sadly, with my camera phone) of the bedroom as the previous owners had it.  Notice the stripey wallpaper, the (filthy) lacy curtains, and the (dirty) carpet.  You can see it better in this picture, without the furniture.

There are several spots on that carpet that I wouldn't want a dog to sit on, but sit on it I did.  Several times.  My sister and I spent two long days getting the wallpaper down.  Now *that* was a chore.  I've never, even been so sore in my life.  After we removed the wallpaper, the walls were a disgusting shade of "wallpaper glue" yellow, and in terrible, terrible shape.  My house was built in 1945 and apparently, no paint had ever touched the walls of this room.  Wallpaper was the wallcovering of choice for all of the previous owners.  So I spackled, and sanded, and spackled, and Rhonda helped me sand, and then I spackled a bit more, and I might have sanded a bit too much, so I had to spackle there, too.  And then I primed the walls.  Almost three coats later, the walls were ready to paint.

During all this time, my brother-in-law and nieces were kind enough to come over and help me put up a ceiling fan.  OK, so maybe my nieces didn't help so much as distract, and maybe my brother-in-law was the one putting the fan up.  But whatever, I got a new fan!  The old one looked quite a bit like this:

The new one?  It looks like this:

Now, the sharp-eyed folks out there will notice there are no pull strings for operating the fan and the light.  That's because the fan is remote control operated.  Yes, the little things in life make me happy!

Anyway, back to the painting.  I went to the home improvement warehouse and purchased some paint, matching it to a Ralph Lauren color in the hopes of using one of his painting techniques.  I painted the room late one Thursday night (or early one Friday morning depending on how you look at it) and let the paint dry.  My sister, as a housewarming present, bought me the Ralph Lauren paint in order to the Candlelight technique.   I followed all of the instructions to the tee, and the finish came out HORRIBLE.  It looks like someone had foiled on gold lame to my bedroom walls.  It should have been a disco it was so shiny.  It looked like WALLPAPER from the 80's that one would find in a downstairs hallway.  Such a bad idea.  So I had to paint the room.  Again.  But with all the travelling and the working on other things, I just finished painting it two weekends ago.

This weekend, knowing that I was going to get my furniture on Monday, I decided that it was time to rip up the carpet.  Again... this took forever!  And the carpet was FILTHY.  But it came up, and WOW!!!  Beautiful hardwoods lurked underneath.

As of Sunday night, my bedroom was looking pretty good.

FYI, that little reflection you see next to the window... that's the Ralph Lauren finish showing through my second coat.  Trust me when I tell you cannot see it in normal light.  Its the flash that's causing the reflection, but typically, you can't see it.  Doesn't show a bit.  But this also goes to show you how great my painting my skills were after three different times painting this room.

Another picture:

See the pretty hardwoods?

And then, I got my furniture.  Total transformation!