Bedroom decor - before & after
Creating a serene escape after our house renovation.
Today I want to share some photos of our bedroom decor, which is something I have been putting off for ages, thinking it wasn’t done to my satisfaction and that I would only film and photograph it when it was ready. I have since learned that ‘ready’ is something I never am, there’s always a new item of furniture to buy, something I want to move and things that can be better. Like all the rooms in our house it’s only when you look back at how truly awful they were that you realise actually, you’ve not done too shabby a job of it.
When we first renovated the house we already had a lot of furniture from our London flat, so we made use of things like my trusty Ikea dressing table and the BFF of many a beauty blogger, the Alex 9 drawer storage unit (seriously, that thing stores a lot of makeup!) The room has a huge window, like most of the windows in this house it’s not a standard drop or width but it does let in a lot of light in the daytime which is lovely. We have a blackout blind from Ikea and then I softened it with these bargain sheer curtains which I love.
Maddie has her own bed in here, but she thinks she’s too good for that and spends most of her time at the foot of the bed watching the world go by out of the window. She spends many a day stretching out and occasionally coming over to my laptop to check on my work – seriously, she’s a little bossy boots. The room had a pendant light and I picked up a new shade from Made.com which I absolutely love, it’s simple yet a bit different to the usual lampshade and fits in well with the grey tones in the room, I’m a total grey addict and we used ‘Silver Mist’ paint by Homebase on the walls, I love how it contrasts with the white in the room.
I used a couple of Ikea picture rails around the room, one above our bed for some decor, and one above the dressing table where I store some nail polishes. The print above the bed is by Ella Masters (she’s closing her online store this week and has 50% off with the code FLASH50 so if you like her stuff I suggest you pounce now!) and it sits next to my favourite album by my favourite lady, Jenny Lewis.
We knew we needed extra storage in the room, so we opted for a bed with four built in drawers and it saves so much space when it comes to bedding, pyjamas and towels, they all tuck away out of sight. I got our headboard on eBay from a shop that specialised in them, it was a total bargain and I love the freedom of having two separate pieces, so you can change the look of your bed in time without having to get a whole new item of furniture. We usually have some variation of white bedding, so the alphabet cushions add some interest, although the dog thinks the M stands for Maddie, not Matt!
Another eBay bargain was our rug, we opted for laminate flooring and we needed something to add some warmth and bring a cosy feeling back to the room, a quick search for fluffy rugs brought up a shop near us and we actually went to collect it. I chose a cool toned grey that is pretty much the same shade as the wall paint, and it ties everything together nicely.
We opted for bedside tables on wheels, since our bed has storage we needed to be able to access the back drawers. Originally I bought floating shelves but it didn’t look quite right, and I hated how all the wires were on show when we charged our phone or had the lamps plugged in. I spotted these bargain tables in Ikea and I loved how the colour added some fun to the room and complemented the cool tones in the grey paint. They have holes in the bottom to feed your phone charger through, so we actually have so much plugged in inside that table! iPhone chargers, camera units, Kindles, you name it they are charging away in there and nobody would be any the wiser.
We repurposed an old mirror my parents had in our family home and painted it white to match the rest of 0ur furniture. I originally planned to hang it, but it’s been leaning on the top of the bookshelves for a while and I actually quite like the way it looks. The bookshelves themselves are the insanely inexpensive Billy bookcases from Ikea – when I spotted how Kate styled them in her living room I thought they would make a great addition to our bedroom. We originally had a large Hemnes dresser there but we decided to move that to the guest room which is where all our clothes are, this was possibly the best thing we did for the room. Switching it up for these bookcases added some extra decor and moving the clothes out of our room entirely has made it way more relaxing, almost hotel-like.
I’m really happy with how everything turned out in the end, my goal was to have something bright, airy and peaceful but not sterile. I love cosy spaces and I like the fact that the furniture is a blank canvas, so if we get bored with the bits and bobs we have on display we can swap them out or add things seasonally without much effort.
For some reason I’m struggling to find photos of how the room was before (maybe it was so horrendous that I have hidden them away somewhere!) but I do have video footage, so if you’d like to have a video tour around this room and see the before in all it’s dirty, bare brick, toilet-in-the-middle-of-the-room glory, take a peek at my video and don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already so you’re updated when I upload new ones!
