Posted By Laura in Competitions, Featured, In the Home | 3 comments

So I got married and moved into my house 22 years ago (almost to the day, actually – 4th July was our 22nd wedding anniversary). It’s a 1920’s semi, which was decorated in a very neat and very uninspired early 90’s fashion – woodchip on the ceilings, with plain and painted textured wallpaper all round.

The first thing we decorated in our excitingly lovely new house was our bedroom – and we were totally inspired. We couldn’t afford to change the blue carpet and curtains, but we stripped the woodchip off the ceiling and went for  a really nice blue wallpaper and a fabulous floral border around where the picture rail might have gone. Our parents loved it – not surprisingly, as it looked like it had been chosen by them.

So; move along 22 years, and what does our bedroom look like now? Erm… it has this horrible 22-yr-old plain blue wallpaper, and a pretty hideous old floral border around the top…

No, really, I mean it.

In 22 years we’ve extended the house to double its size, had a new kitchen (twice), a new bathroom, replaced the conservatory, redecorated the children’s bedrooms at least twice each… but our room? We just never seem to get round to it. I mean, it’s just where we sleep, right? The other rooms always seem to be a little more important. And after all it’s perfectly serviceable – it’s warm and dry and holds the bed and our clothes. Every year we think it’ll do for another year. And another. and another…

So now I’m having a lot of fun with the planning – and maybe it’ll be the prompt I need to get the paint out. The temptation may well become all too much…

So. What do I crave from my bedroom? If it were ever to be anything other than 90’s blue and floral, obviously.
Once I started pinning (you can see the Grown Up Bedroom Inspiration Board here) it became clear quite quickly that I already have a strong idea of what I’m looking for.

I started off with a room theme much like this:

Cool, Calm and white. A heavenly soothing shower for the eyes after the 20-year-old blues. Ours isn’t a big bedroom, so I need to maximise light and space. I am lucky in that I have a huge double opening window which when flung wide creates a massive space in the bedroom wall, looking out across stunning Dorset countryside. I don’t want to detract from that, or make the room feel smaller or darker, so the basic palette was simple then: White walls, and the fabulous original 1920’s floorboards stripped and either oiled or painted white too. I’ll decide for sure once I see them stripped if that’s okay with you?

But of course it’s all in the detail.  So here’s the nine things I ended up deciding I simply couldn’t live without:

So – that’s my Dream Bedroom. What d’you think? Now I’ve got that far, I can’t wait to get started for real. I *need* that room in my house! My cyber-spend came to £10,500… but £8,000 of that was that properly magnificent bed. It’s the first time I’ve actually pulled all the elements of a room together before I lifted a paintbrush, and it was so much fun – and I know that the next stages from here will be much easier with such a definite plan in mind.
I ended up with a really strong visual of a pretty perfect bedroom for me. Certainly a room I could sleep sweet dreams in ;)

So – this is me, handing the Dream Rooms baton on to all of my blogger friends. Tell me about your perfect bedroom. Get cyber-shopping my friends, it’s incredibly liberating to dream shop with no budget ;)