Were Black Walls The Right Decision?

I made a bit of progress on the home gym this weekend, and I’m pretty excited about the decision I made for the closet area walls. But I have to admit, it was a huge struggle for me to feel motivated to do anything. As soon as I hit “publish” on Friday’s post, I checked my email and saw that I had received an email from the place in Austin that has my damaged external hard drive. I opened it, and read the first line: “We have exhausted all possible means to determine your media is not recoverable.“

I cried. Again, that’s almost two decades of pictures, including all of my blog pictures from 16 years of blogging. Yes, I have pictures on my blog of all of my projects, but what’s on my blog is a tiny fraction of all of the pictures on that hard drive. I still get a lump in my throat when I think about it. It makes me so sick to my stomach that I didn’t check to verify that the drive was being backed up on Carbonite. I just assumed the backups were working properly, and now I’m paying for that assumption.

That completely knocked the wind out of my sails. I couldn’t motivate myself to do any work on Friday, so I took the opportunity to visit my friend who’s in the hospital. She’s the type of friend with whom I could sit and talk for hours, which is exactly what we did.

By Saturday, I was in a little better head space, and was actually feeling pretty excited about getting some painting done. And at the suggestion of many of you, I decided to paint the closet area black.

Let me refresh your memory and show you what color the closet was originally…

That color did absolutely nothing for that closet, and looked horrible with the walnut color of the dresser.

I considered painting the wall a solid color selected from the colors of the stripes, but the only one that made sense to me was the darkest teal…

That looked horrible with all of the warm colors in the stripes on the surrounding walls.

But when a few of you suggested black, that just made completely sense in my mind! Black is a main color in the room, and I thought it would look amazing with the warm colors of the stripes just outside the closet area.

And y’all were right! Black was the perfect choice! This color is Limousine Leather from Behr.

I haven’t hung the mirrors yet because I’m wondering if I need to do something to them to make them show up better. They have very thin black frames because I was always planning to hang them on the colorful stripes walls. But as plans have progressed, I’ve decided to hang them in the closet flanking the dresser, and now that the walls are black, the frames completely disappear. So I’m not really sure what to do about those. But they’ll be hanging on the wall, so the won’t be covering up the baseboards like they are right now.

Yesterday, I gave the dresser one last tweak. If you’ll remember, after the original makeover, it looked like this…

I loved the drawers, but I wasn’t really excited about the wide band of black at the bottom. So I removed that base (which was very easy to do by removing six screws), and tried these metal furniture feet.

I really like those furniture feet, but I didn’t love that they were hard to see against the black carpet. I expected them to show up more, but because they’re shiny metal, they ended up reflecting the black carpet and blending in. I had to position myself just so in order to take the picture above so that the legs would show up fairly well, but when standing in the room, the legs kind of disappeared from most angles.

So I decided to make one last change. I removed the walnut trim from the wide black piece at the bottom, and then added it to the bottom black piece that forms the main box of the dresser, and then added four of the legs. I like that it shows up clearly against the black carpet, and the dresser doesn’t look like it’s floating.

But now, as you can see from the picture just above, I do have an issue with disappearing mirrors. I mean, you can’t even see that there’s a mirror to the right of the dresser, can you? So I need a solution to that. This weekend, I bought the TV that will go above the dresser, so I can get that hung on the wall today. And then my neon sign is out for delivery today! Woohoo! If I can figure out out what to do with those mirror frames, and there’s a quick and easy solution, I might have a finished home gym closet by the end of the day.

Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.

I hope you’ll join me on my DIY and decorating journey! If you want to follow my projects and progress, you can subscribe below and have each new post delivered to your email inbox. That way you’ll never miss a thing!