As we looked for ways to personalize our bedrooms, I quickly settled on white as the dominant paint color for mine. We had already agreed on keeping the downstairs walls white, on the creamy side, especially for the way it enhances the marvelous natural light we have here on the island.

In my case, I wanted the purest white possible, a reminder of the incredible beacon at the fringe of the moon immediately before and after a full solar eclipse. On a more practical note, the white theme guaranteed that the line between the ceiling and walls would be continuous rather than jagged.

To close off the closet, I wanted a curtain rather than a door, in part to maximize space in the room and in part for a bold accent. I quickly gravitated toward indigo for the fabric. Yes, I have a taste for sushi and sashimi and Japanese design in general. The curtain inspiration, should you ask, springs from a few favorite restaurants. Besides, I have a long love of ascetic clarity, including the Shakers as well as Zen, even before I became Quaker and flirted with its historic Plain style, which can also be seen here.

The bedspread and bookshelves would add their own colors and textures to the mix.

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Playing around with the blueness, I even did some online scans and duly noted:

My desired bedroom blue accent
Somewhere around 13 red, 27 green, 54 blue, 100% opacity
Just give me a name, somehow
Hex #0D1B36, for starters
As for the purest white of whites?
Is it even possible?

Just so I’d be ready when it came time to trot off to the paint store or fabric shop.

~*~

Christmas intervened before the upstairs was ready for painting.

Gift-giving in our family often turns into an art, sometimes including items found at yard sales. Other times it includes items you never knew you wanted or needed, though you soon discover otherwise – I’ve often been advanced on high-tech edges that way.

So, this past holiday, I unwrapped one box and encountered sample strips of cloth, all blue, nine in total, traditionally Japanese and dark blue. Along with an offer to make the curtain from my fabric of choice.

I had no idea it could get this complicated.

They were darker than the indigo I originally envisioned, as well as more intriguing. How would each one interact with the rest of the elements in the room? I invited reactions from others in the family, and weighed those in with my own observations. What caught my fancy early on soon moved toward more subtle patterns. I’ll leave it at that for now.

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Beyond a café curtain on the double-hung sash window, I’m planning no “window treatments” in the room. (How I detest that term.) Privacy isn’t an issue, considering the height of the other windows, nor is direct sunlight in a north-facing room.

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Continuing with the color choice palette and turning to the floor, online searches quickly convinced me that dark blue would be too much, even in small exposures. Dark red, which we had in Dover, would have resulted in a red-white-and-blue cliché. I started leaning on hunter green but began wondering if going lighter, as others in this project were thinking, might make sense.

However this turned out would be nothing like anything I had before.

A traditional New England home comes without closets, or perhaps has some quirky ones that were added later but inefficiently. It’s an unanticipated jolt for those of us who grew up elsewhere.

That tradition was something our renovation sought to rectify. Indeed, maximizing storage space was a pivotal consideration in our planning. As I’ve noted, our present home is smaller than the previous one, not that its closets were notable, even before considering all the storage capacity we had in the red barn. Yes, the barn that inspired this blog. The garden shed we added here is much, much smaller.

A few locals have been surprised by the results – what they see as closets everywhere in the newly redesigned upstairs. Each bedroom has one. Although these are shallower than a full-sized walk-in closet, they are deep enough for hanging clothes, which is our primary need.

The key in adding these came in realizing that the distance between the gable windows was two feet, enough to run narrow closets along the dividing line between the front and back bedrooms. Our original plan had those closets alternating, half for one bedroom and the other half for its neighbor. But that changed when we decided to give all of that opening to the back bedrooms, which were also smaller.

In compensation, the two front bedrooms got a shallow loft running atop those closets, as well as their own closets elsewhere in the reconfigured rooms.

Quite simply, the closet in each bedroom is unique.

Additional storage space appears in the laundry room as well as a small hallway broom closet. Yes, even a place to stash the vacuum cleaner.

Another consideration I haven’t mentioned was the upstairs flooring.

As much as we would have liked polished hardwood, our budget called for something more affordable.

The existing flooring was more piecemeal, with unevenness and knots. It did speak of the rustic origins of the house and its historic character. Our contractor mentioned some flooring that would match it, and we were onboard. (Sorry for the pun.)

Refinishing those planks might have looked historically charming, though they were never great to begin with. Instead, we salvaged what we could and added fresh to continue.

The next question was how to treat it. Apart from two rooms and a hallway of vinyl flooring downstairs, the existing flooring, upstairs and down, had been painted a light blue that easily flaked. Could it be sanded and refinished in a natural finish? Did we have time to undertake that? Otherwise, what color of paint could we agree on, at least for the bedrooms? The bathroom and laundry room might be a different matter requiring something more waterproof.

I had hoped to decide on a paint color extending across all of the upstairs. Mine was the minority vote.

That left me facing a decision for my room. Please stay tuned.