A Bedroom Makeover 4. Phew!

The before shot.

What was supposed to be a quick weekend project seems to have grown considerably and sucked up more time than we could have predicted. It started with just some new shelves and a bed and has become almost a complete change, short of painting the walls. The reality is that a large portion of the time hasn't actually been spent working on the room at all, but sorting, filing, organising and binning. We've done a fairly thorough go through of all storage in the upstairs of our house; that includes all those awkward boxes we've just moved from house to house, containing a most random selection of things.

However, it is now done. And boy does it feel good for it. Let me show you around.

Firstly we have a new bed frame so that our guests don't have to crawl around on the floor when they come to stay. We fitted it with bedside lights for easy bedtime reading.

Next up we've fitted a small shelf either side of the bed, carefully calibrated to fit a smart phone, a book and a cup of tea which should keep most guests happy. The shelves have been spray painted bright red and the covered with a waterproof gloss varnish so should be happy to take a hot mug directly.

We made a last minute decision to take out the carpet that was in here and replace it with a laminate floor. This was mostly fuelled by the idea that the pink would clash with the red shelves, and we wanted red shelves (and definitely not pink shelves). This stemmed from this trio of pictures that I made earlier in the year - the splash of red with the blue walls became the theme for the room.

Paper cut with red tissue paper backing.

Next, new shelves. In the end we went with the open shelves despite the bit of me that is concerned for the dust implications. We liked the idea of having a hodge-podge of boxes and jars, of being able to peruse our craft materials when looking for inspiration, of making the most of the colours and prettiness that comes with paints/buttons/wool/fabric etc. We're also hopefully that having it on display will inspire us to keep it tidier.

As part of these shelves we modified a wider shelf to fit the same mountings, treated it in the same way as the bedside tables and turned it into a little dressing table, complete with mirror and chair. A full length mirror has been mounted on the wall too.

Finally we've created a lampshade to finish the room off. This is quite momentous for us - we're not very good with lampshades and quite a few rooms in the house are missing one. It seems that making it ourselves might be the way forward (surprisingly it seemed to take less decision making). Being bad bloggers we haven't photographed the process, so here it is in a nutshell.

• We bought the metal rings that go in the top and bottom and a sheet of veneer 
• We stuck it all together with doublesided tape (recommended for fabric lampshades - not so sure about wood) and left it overnight held together by a lot of clothes pegs  
• We've reglued the side seam - the veneer isn't very keen on being a tube. 

Unfortunately, its still not quite holding. When we've got it sussed we'll let you know - for the moment we've left the pegs on so we could hang it up and see how it looks. It produces a lovely warm glow when the lights on and shows the grain of the wood beautifully. All the more reason to make this work!

And that's it. One bedroom. All that's left to do is label the boxes so that we can remember where we put everything. And the printers, the ones that started the whole process off? They're now making the most of the extra space created under the bed in the littlest bedroom.