A Bedroom Makeover 1. Decision Making

On Sunday we spontaneously decided to rearrange what furniture we have in our guest bedroom. Its a simple room and this didn't take long, but it did start off the conversation. You know the one. Its starts with "maybe one day we should find a better place for these printers", follows up with "perhaps we should replace this desk with a more suitable table" and ends up with deciding to do a complete overhaul of what this room contains.

The facts. This room is 3.1m x 2.9m, and looses a small box section to the airing cupboard in the corner. It currently contains a kingsize mattress, a large desk, some printers and a couple of storage boxes. The desk never gets used as a desk. It is a hangover from our student days, whereas now we favour the kitchen table when needed. It does however provide a useful place for guests to put things - but takes up lots of space for this use.

The plan. Firstly, we wanted to get a bed frame for the mattress. This is long overdue and comes with also sorting bedside tables and lamps. Secondly we wanted to replace the desk with something more like a dressing table, sort out a nice mirror and make that a smaller but more usable space. Finally, we wanted to add some storage. This would ease the pressure on the box room which - while containing a bed - is mostly just stuff!

The big question has been what sort of storage as this will very much dictate the look and feel of the room. Our aim has been some sort of units with a gap in the middle that we could fill with the dressing table. We've been spending quite a bit of time browsing Ikea's website looking for ideas.


Idea 1: IVAR

We already have some of the IVAR system. With a bit of expansion we could have a narrow set of shelves up each side and a couple of shelves across the top. It would be quite open, and so we'd sort most of our things into boxes to keep things tidy. These boxes could be boring or a colourful and eclectic mix to make them a feature in their own right. Unfortunately these shelves don't fill the gap as nicely as some of the others, but would be quick and easy to put together.

IVAR

Idea 2: BORGSJO

This is simply two bookcases on each side, however the widths available mean that the space in the middle is rather squeezed. This has the advantage that we can use doors to hide all our stuff, though we've wondered whether solid doors would be more imposing on the room. Of course we could leave them without doors and use boxes as above.

BORGSJO

Idea 3: PAX

These are wardrobes and fall somewhere between ideas one and two in terms of size, layout and that doors vs boxes question.

PAX

Now all we need to do is make a decision...