Farmhouse Bedroom: Design, Paint and Furniture

If you’re interested in whipping up a farmhouse bedroom for yourself, chances are you don’t live on a farm, which is great–it’ll make the job much easier. A real farmhouse might look any number of ways. A carefully crafted farmhouse in town is a fun and doable project.

A traditional farmhouse bedroom–like all of its fellow farmhouse rooms–is a wooden, rugged, and eclectic kind of situation with dirt floors and multi-origin, hand-me-down furniture. There’s a certain cozy delightfulness in such an environment. It smacks of, “If we all stick together, we should be able to make it through winter. Now let’s huddle around the stove and tell stories.”

For a modern, deliberately arranged farmhouse bedroom, the idea is to evoke as much of that cozy, togetherness feeling as you can, while incorporating as little of the frostbite as possible.

A turn-of-the-century farming family probably wouldn’t have wasted calories painting their walls but, if they did, they’d probably use simple whitewash. Thus, white is the most commonly found color in farmhouse-style rooms. If you opt for another color, remember to keep it neutral and pale, as if it was applied 100 years ago and has clearly aged, but gracefully, healthily, evenly. Like a fine wine or Richard Geere.

The exposed-wood-beams look is another feature of traditional farmhouses that can be tastefully integrated into your modern farmhouse. Of course, in a real farmhouse, it’s because the wood that would have gone on the ceiling is needed in the stove–but odds are, you have insulation. Somehow, that look truly is beautiful when it’s done right.

When it comes to your farmhouse bed, you’ll want to start with a pile of straw on the floor. If that gets out of control, try stuffing a few burlap sacks with the straw from before and tying them off with some hemp twine or a little strand of goat intestine.

Of course, if the bugs and mice make it so you absolutely have to get your bed off the floor, there are plenty of rustic wood and simulation-wood bed frames out there that look like they were cobbled together by master craftsmen with infinite patience and sandpaper, and some of them were. Remember, make it fun.

Importantly, you don’t ever have to say that you’re “done” creating your farmhouse-yet-aesthetic bedroom. Like your worldview and personality, you can continue fine-tuning your space for as long as you use it. Our farming ancestors did their best to keep nature out of their homes. Today, we can pickily allow only our favorite parts of nature in . If bugs and mice aren’t your thing, try some ivy around your bed. This is just one more reason that it’s so much easier to create the perfect farmhouse bedroom anywhere but on a farm.

Fitzpatrick Painting, a leading construction, remodeling and painting company in Oregon, has done hundreds of jobs of every type. The team at Fitzpatrick could turn a state-of-the-art laboratory into a farmhouse bedroom if someone wanted them to. Make sure to give Fitzpatrick a call when you’re looking for contractors. There truly is no beating honesty, experience, and a little professional whimsy.