What's in my bedroom....

A recent post on blogging edge got me thinking about the room where I sleep.  Your bedroom should be your sanctuary, yes?  Peaceful, cosseting, somewhere you can go to relax, where you can get a great night's sleep and feel rejuvenated the next morning?

Urgent attention needed!

Hmmm - I'm not sure that my bedroom meets those criteria just at the moment.  It's desperately in need of some TLC before it can dispense any to me.  It suffers from damp - not of the rising sort, more the creeping-through-the-walls sort (250 year old house by the sea doesn't exactly help). Bubbling plaster like this does NOT a sanctuary make.  

The delightful built-in wardrobes that we inherited with the house, whilst very practical and capacious, don't exactly scream luxury do they!?

Great (but ugly) storage

  One definite keeper in the makeover will be my late Mum's lovely walnut dressing table - my parents bought it when they got married in the 1940s and it holds lots of happy memories for me.

Hurray! Spring is here!

Spring is finally in the air (hurray) and at last we can throw open the windows to let our bedroom air thoroughly before tackling that plasterwork.  It's time to bite the bullet and completely redecorate our bedroom and make it into that luxurious bolthole that I've always dreamed of.   Now this may be where my problem lies - procrastination and indecision......should I go for a chic "moody dark" hotel style, or perhaps a sexy boudoir?  How about cool contemporary minimalism (although I fear that looks lovely on paper, but falls apart in practice when your husband is known for leaving his clothes lying all over the place!)?  One thing is for sure, I have to inject some colour into the room, plain white walls (which is what we have right now) are just too clinical for a bedroom.  

I read this post by emoov.co.uk about home staging to get an idea on how to update my room even though I'm not in the processing of selling at the moment.  I now know that the clutter has to go and that everything needs freshening up.
Lighting is SO important in the bedroom.  I have a whole host of requirements;  low lighting for romantic ambience, task lighting for reading in bed (check out my current solution!),

Practical for reading...

a way of reducing the bright light of early summer mornings to help us sleep longer, and enough light to be able to see what I'm wearing in the dark winter mornings so I don't wear mismatching clothes (unfortunately, it has been known!).


I bought this gorgeous throw in the souk in Muscat, Oman and have decided to use it as the starting point for updating our bedroom.  I can pick out a couple of these warm co-ordinating colours as the basis for walls and accessories.

Great place to start for colour scheme

We can't afford to replace the carpet, and anyway, it's a neutral oatmeal colour so shouldn't impact the overall scheme.  Along with blackout blinds (see lighting above), I'd like some opulent curtains to draw in the winter to make the room feel super cosy.  I have a comfy wing chair that I like to curl up in and would love to get recovered using one of the key colours of the throw (I did manage that task once a few years ago at a night class in sewing/upholstery, but pretty sure I couldn't repeat it without the help of the teacher and we've moved 200 miles away since then!).  And those wardrobe cupboard doors have to go, ideally to be replaced by something swish and modern, but in keeping with the walnut dressing table.  A luxurious big headboard (none of those metal ones for me - I like to sit up to read in bed) and high-count bedlinen are must-haves.

Sometimes it's the small touches that can make a big difference - I would love to replace all our mismatched hangers with gorgeous wooden ones and invest in one enormous abstract print to hang on the wall taken from one of my own photographs so it's really personal and unique.

Better crack on now I've got all these ideas!