A Bedroom Makeover 6. More Labels

A rather photo heavy post with the rest of the box labels...

Joe asked that this one looked like a toddler had been allowed near
the glitter. It certainly went all over the table so I think that counts!

Calculators, hole punch, staplers etc...

Getting photos of more of the shelves together was a little tricky without all the labels reflecting the light and turning into bright white squares! Making these has been good fun and should certainly make it easier next time we wonder "which box was that in again?" (which we're already doing regularly).

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A Bedroom Makeover 5. Labels

It's been a couple of months and our new guest room has been tested by a few people with great success. Meanwhile we've been working away at one of the final details that's taken a fair bit of effort.

When we made our final decision to go with boxes full of stuff rather than shutting it away in cupboards one of the things that swung us was the scope for a bit of creativity. We bought boxes of many different colours and sizes and tried to create a collage of shapes and patterns as we positioned them. To finish it all off we've been making labels for each box.

They're all based around the same design element - papercut descriptions of what each box contains. These have taken weeks of doing a few every now and then. I created myself a set of letters to trace to keep things uniform, and utilised my tablet as a backlight to help with tracing before carefully cutting each one out.

Once they were all done the real fun began - to personalise each label with the items in it's box, before laminating them all up. Here's some of them, with  more to follow. Sorry, the lamination has made photo taking hard.

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Wires, wires everywhere.... pt 2

Last Sunday we showed you how we'd set up our bedside tables to contain USB sockets. Yesterday, after ordering some more components this week, we set about finishing off the project with wired in bedside lights.

The lamps we've got have their switch on the cable, so each night when you're half asleep and wanting to turn the light out you have to go scrabbling around down the side of the cabinet to find out where the switch has got to. Since we were trying to wire up our cupboards anyway we decided to fit permanent light switches to make things easier.

First we cut out the original switch so that we could replace it with the one we wanted, then created a hole in the top of the chest to take the wire from the lamp.

With another hole ready for the new switch, we fed both the cable from the lamp and the cable from the plug through this hole ready to solder to the new switch.

Then we soldered all the wires together and sealed the joints with heat shrink - this was going to be mains power and we didn't want to risk loose connections.

Finally we cut a hole in the back of the cabinet to feed both the plug from the lamp and the USB cable through. These are then plugged in under the bed and the bedside table has a nice, clean finish.

This has been a project that we've been talking about for a long time, and its so nice to see it all done. I may (or may not - just saying) have wandered into the bedroom merely to turn the light on and off yesterday.

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Wires, wires everywhere...

One thing you may have noticed around here is that we like our gadgets and tech, and not just in the kitchen. Smartphone? Tick. Tablet? Tick. E-readers? Tick. Consequently we each have a charging station at our bedside that looks like this:

Wires, wires, everywhere. Plugs that are chunky and take up space, coupled with bedside lights and other odds and ends (cup of tea - very important), and it's getting unwieldy. It's a daily battle to keep each wire running in a different direction to stop things ending up in a tangled mess. We've long been debating ways of tackling this, and with the move in the last few years towards all gadgets charging from a USB socket we finally made a decision. USB sockets mounted in our bedside tables.

One thing you might not know is that I'm an Electronic Engineer. While my day job is in the world of software I don't like to pass up an opportunity to get my soldering iron out at the weekend. Add this to Joe's love of D.I.Y. electronics and this task was well within our remit. 

WARNING: Things from here on might get a little technical, though I'll try not to go too far. Feel free just to look at the pictures!

First things first. What does a USB socket look like and how does it work, you ask? There's a picture below for you and it consists of two slots for USB cables and a set of four pins. Two of the pins are for power and ground, the other two are for data signals. In general you only need to connect up the power and ground in order to charge your device, the data signals are used for transferring data to and from your computer. Some devices (<cough>apple<cough>) also need fixed voltages on the data inputs in order to charge. 

Unfortunately some of our gadgets fit that description so we needed to cater for them as well.

Joe set about cutting neat holes in the top of our cabinets to neatly fit each socket. This didn't take him too long with a trusty chisel. 

Next we set about prototyping the circuit we were planning on making to check that it would actually charge things. It was a good job we did this as it was only at this stage we discovered we needed the extra voltages on the data in pins. 

Here is the circuit diagram (should you wish to replicate this yourself): 

Then we soldered all of that in place. To keep things as small as possible we soldered the legs of the resistors to each other and then directly to the pins on the socket before isolating it all with electrical tape.

Finally we attached them to the tables using Polymorph and screws which have created a really solid mounting point. If you've not come across Polymorph before we'd recommend it - we use for all sorts of odds and ends. 

And that's it. So far we've completed step one - to get a USB socket mounted and powered from our normal charging plugs hidden away in a draw. Hopefully at some point we'll get these connected up to transformers, allowing us to plug in the bedside table as a whole and power not just the two sockets, but also a lamp each. But that's for later...

The finished article

Happily connected to, and changing, Joe's phone.

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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.

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