The final addition to our bedroom renovation was some new bedside tables. The old ones were quite large and I didn’t think they would fit nicely with our new, larger, bed in our small room. I had thought about building some smaller bedside tables, but while cleaning out my office one day prior to renovating the room, I found some floating shelves that I had bought years ago. I can’t even remember what my plans had been for them. Possibly some shelves in the washroom and they ended up being too long. Either way, they had a nice grey tone to them, and I thought they may look nice as our bedside tables. Added bonus is keeping the floor space clear for Roomba to do its thing.

Once again, they grey doesn’t completely match any of the other grey in the room, but the glorious thing about the flooring we chose is that it is streaked with so many different colours and shades of grey that almost any grey addition to our room will match it. The bed also has a few shades of grey so they manage to compliment each other as well.

When we were planning a king size bed, we had thought that there wouldn’t be much space around the bed, especially on Kurt’s side since my side of the bed has the closet and we wanted to leave some space to get items in and out easily. I was a little worried that the floating shelves may be too long to go on both sides of the bed. So once the paint was dry, I started doing some measurements and realized that there would be plenty of space for them, and leave room to get in and out of the closet easily.

Now, choosing the right height to hang the floating shelves was a bit of a conundrum that I had to think out. As I thought about it, I realized that our old bedside tables were level with our mattress, which had been nice. So that is what I planned. I have never hung these floating shelves before and was worried that there could potentially be 2 issues once I started drilling holes into the walls.

Issue 1 – I would hang them too high or too low. The nice thing, is that if this did happen, it would only be out by less than an inch, so it was an easy potential issue to move on from. Luckily, I did all my math right and measured properly and they line up beautifully with the mattress.

Issue 2 – On Kurt’s side, I would either not give myself enough room from the corner, or I would give too much room and have a weird gap. Once again, after quadruple checking my measurements, I was successful in having it snug in the corner. If I hadn’t, I would have just had to move the brace and drill some new holes. Conveniently the other holes would be hidden behind the shelf, but it didn’t come to that, and our wall only has the holes necessary for the shelves.

We started with the shelf on Kurts side so that the bed would be snug between the two shelves. Once Kurt’s was hung, we slid the bed into position and hung my bedside table. It’s definitely not centred in the room, but that is ok since we wanted the extra space by the closet. If we had a larger room, then I would have absolutely centered the bed on the wall, but we have a small room, so we need all the space we can get where we need it.

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On the wall opposite the bed, we have a mount for a TV. Our TV just broke, with the sound no longer working, so we will need to replace it. We weren’t sure we were going to, but on the odd occasion it is nice to be able to crawl into bed and watch a movie. Or when you are sick, it is nice to just be able to stay in bed rather than post up on the couch. Under the TV mount, we had a small table for our sound machine and our clock. Now that the room was looking all shiny and new, the little table looked a little haggard.

Keeping with the theme of keeping things off the floor, I decided to invest in another floating shelf that could go on that wall. Luckily the store that I bought the bedside ones at years ago, was still selling them and I was able to get the next size up for a little extra shelf space. Who knows, maybe we will put something there other than just our sound machine & clock. Likely cluttered with stuff…and I predict it will be my stuff, not Kurt’s, since the little table was usually home to my clutter.

I knew this one needed to hang a little higher than the nightstands otherwise it would look off. It would have been too close to the ground, and a little awkward if we did decide to use it to store things. I wanted this one to be an ideal height to use when standing. It is about 8″ above the height of the side tables, which I was happy with. I also once again didn’t centre it in the room, but rather centered it to the bed. Then at least it gives the feeling of symmetrical in the room.

This one was a little more fidgety to hang. It didn’t come with all the screws required to hang it like the bedside ones did. It seemed odd to me that they wouldn’t include something as small as a few screws and drywall plugs. Luckily I have both in abundance, so I didn’t have to make another trip out to get the shelf hung. That being said, attempt 1 at hanging the shelf did not go perfectly. I noticed that it had a slight tilt after the first day and was a little wiggly. So, I pulled it off and added a few more screws to the bars. I also went a size up from a #8 to a #10 screw and that seemed to do the trick. Now it is mostly solid and level. I wouldn’t load to much on any of these shelves, but for what we have planned for them, we shouldn’t have to worry about that.

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The room now looks finished. Though I hate the curtains I picked out. They remind me of garbage bags, so I am sure I will be replacing them with something else eventually, but for now they will do. They are blackout curtains, which is what I wanted, so I guess they are doing the job I needed them for. But still, with a beautiful new room, eventually I will need to change them out to something more suited. Until then, we will enjoy the feel of a brand new room.