Let's Discuss our Bedroom Problems

Now that I'm getting close to finishing our bedroom (yeah I know, slow or what) I'm going to show you the "before" photos and what needed to be done to get this bedroom to start acting like the calm peaceful organized retreat it is supposed to be.  It is a little embarrassing to show you these photos as the bedroom was a hot mess. I had already started to take one of the bookshelves out of the bedroom when I took the photo below so some of the things had already been moved around, but to be honest it wasn't really a very organized place at the best of times.

So let's have a look at the problem areas and discuss:
1. The eyebrow window - aka the bane of my existence.  There is a streetlight outside of our bedroom window and we aren't the best sleepers so we needed to have good light coverage on the windows and the eyebrow window made it very difficult to figure out a good arrangement.  I had cut some foam-core boards to fit the arched window and that blocked out the light. My original plan was to cover the foam-core board in material to match the drapes, but in the end we came up with a better plan - a much, much better plan.
2.  The drapes - I thought going wide would be good, but instead it always just looked like a wall of material, the drapes were hard to slide because they were hung using the tabs along the top, and the curtain rod anchors were coming out of the wall.  Yikes.
3.  The bookcases - There were two bookcases side-by-side that you can see a tiny bit of on the left side of the photo above.  I will spare you any other pictures of them, but they were crammed with books and the top was piled with boxes and family photos.  In a word - they were messy.
4.  The bed - We have a rather strange bedframe that means the mattress is lower than usual and as you can see it was slightly lower than the trunk we had at the foot of the bed.
5.  Too much furniture and stuff in one room - Enough said!
6.  The messy dresser - It was usually a mess because anything on it (like my jewelry boxes) got moved aside whenever Jonathan needed to use his laptop as that was the only place he had found to get internet access.  
7.  The walls - The darker gray accent wall had been painted about five years ago when I first started work on this room, but life got in the way and then I got onto decorating other rooms so I never finished painting the other walls.  They still had the original thin white (now grubby) builder's paint on them.

8.  The ceiling light - The overhead light (which you can see in the photo above) is a cheapo installed by the builder and needed to be replaced.
So there you have it -  the terrible, no good, horrible disaster of a room.  I'm finishing the last few things on the bedroom today and hope to show you photos tomorrow.  I tell you I'm liking the change.
Update:  See this post if you want to see how the bedroom looks now!