Slow Goodbyes: The Master Bedroom

Well, after I started writing this post, I realized I don't have a ton to say on this one! (And yet you'll finish reading and say, Goodness she says a lot for a girl who has nothing to say.)

I feel like our master bedroom was this giant box of decorating potential that never saw its finest moment.

I find it fascinating that when I watch all the house shows on TV, the master bedroom is always this huge source of discussion for people. They have very specific master bedroom/bathroom needs, and if the place is too small or the bathroom doesn't have a car wash inside, they just can't even with the house. We basically just needed a place to park the bed and take a shower. I'm sure it was different for us because we don't have kids. We didn't need the master to be a place where we could also retreat for privacy or stash a home office or workout equipment.

So in our house, the master was a HUGE room that we didn't really have enough furniture to fill, even though we had a king sized bed and two end tables and a dresser and a bookcase...you get the idea. We did have a big walk-in closet, but we don't have a ton of clothes. And the bathroom was actually fairly small as master bathrooms go. It didn't even have a double sink!

But it worked splendidly for our needs. We were able to rest well in there every night, and that's really what matters most.

* One of my favorite things about our master was the huge window that ran along one wall. It had vertical blinds and white sheer curtains, so even though we never fully opened up everything (for privacy), the room was always flooded with amazing light. It had a wide ledge on it, so Braeya enjoyed crawling up in there and surveying the yard. (Or as you see in the photo below - sprawling out on the floor.)

* We really didn't do a ton to this room in the time we lived there. We did have to replace the carpet when we replaced it throughout the house. And we painted two of the walls a light blue, leaving the other two the tan they were when we moved in. It gave the room a cool, beachy feel, and that worked for us. We pretty much replicated the look we had in our Marion house - same bedding and pillows and all that.

* I did love my gallery wall over to the side. I don't know if I'll ever do a gallery wall again, but I am glad I can say I did it once in my life and I enjoyed it. It was filled with a hodge-podge of art and pictures that represented us.

* We did do one last project in here during quarantine: we took down the closet door (which swung inward and made it hard to open dresser drawers inside) and replaced it with a barn door. We LOVED the way it looked and had plans to do the same thing with the bathroom door when we redid that...except we never got to it.

We loved our master. It really was a wonderful retreat for us, and we appreciated the chance to have a whole suite on one side of the house where we could go if we had guests spending the night. They could have their side of the house and we could have ours, and everyone had privacy! (Blessings on the inventor of the split floor plan!)

We did a lot of talking and dreaming and praying in this room - as we fell asleep at night and woke up on lazy Saturday mornings.

But other than that, we honestly didn't spend a lot of time in this room! It wasn't a hangout spot for us. So that makes story time pretty short, doesn't it?

In fact, the only big story I can think of to tell you is that when Ryan's mom lived with us for that short time after her surgery, I used to hide in the closet to eat dessert. She wasn't supposed to have desserts because she had medication-induced blood sugar issues. But if she knew about the dessert, I couldn't keep her out of it. So I would hide all the bad/good stuff in our closet and sit in there to eat it!

But even that is a sweet memory (literally) from this house that I will always carry with me.

The new owners of the house are SO EXCITED about a big master retreat and will honestly probably get far more daily life out of this room than we did. I'm excited for them! Our new master will be much smaller - and that's okay, too! We actually decided to downsize to a Queen to make it a little less crowded. We'll still have plenty of room for the dreaming and talking and praying - and maybe even a little more sleep than we've had before? Maybe not?