The Master Bedroom. Your own little sanctuary at the end of the day to sink into a sea of sleep. Or if you’re parents to a toddler, it’s the place you hide for 5 minutes before they wake up again for another round of smushing Play Doh into the carpet. #mumlolz
If you’re new around here, hello! Make yourself comfortable. I’ve actually just moved house but before all the chaos set in, I was writing a “debrief” if you will of the previous one. Our first home, in fact, which we lovingly renovated – showcasing the real-life transformation over the years – warts and all.
All our rooms have had their Instagram-worthy moments, but I’ll be honest with you, quite often they’re just swamped in laundry. So today on the honest house tour, we’re heading upstairs to the Master Bedroom. And if you’re itching to see our BRAND SPANKING NEW HOUSE, a full house tour is coming in November.
Catch up with the Honest House Tour Here:
Kitchen | Lounge | Hallway
THE HISTORY
This was actually the first room we decorated. And I use the term decorate rather loosely. We acquired the keys about a fortnight before moving in so made a good start with adding heating to the house, getting all the rot out, and starting on the plastering. The room began as a pink-walled box, complete with moss green carpet and a disused fireplace. It actually sounds bang on trend when I put it into this simplified terminology, but it was sadly a mess through years of neglect and everything was stripped out. The night we moved in, the walls had been re-plastered and flooring ripped up. We moved in, only with a bed, a bottle of bubbly and ordered a Chinese takeaway. The first night in our home.
*Warning* Garbage old 2011-cameraphone picture incoming.
WORK DONE
Just like every room, we started from scratch. Once the initial walls were plastered we painted the room in Dulux’s Polished Pebble (a soft grey) and Melon Sorbet (a muted olive green for the feature wall). The carpet was stripped as it was over 60 years old and neglected, and we threw in all of our existing furniture and hoped for the best. It didn’t fit the size of the room but with your first house you just make do whilst you save. (We eventually replaced the carpet. Got it as a birthday present. Things change when you become a homeowner!)
The only way we were able to have that blank slate is through that 2 week window where we didn’t live in the house. We’d go to work, stop by the house in the evening, work work work some more, and then head back to the flat in the middle of the night, ready to go again the next day.
We lived without curtains in here for ages and it’s a low window. If our neighbours have seen my bare arse, I wouldn’t be surprised. Whilst many would hate this, we spent many a night curled up in bed and watching the space station go by (we named our daughter after the moon, we’re obviously space nerds). And some of you UKers may remember about 3 years ago we had an insanely bright thunder storm. Lasted the whole night. We watched it from our bed and it was magical.
Over time I loathed thegreen colour and the paint job. As with many older houses, the walls aren’t straight, and when we’d painted the feature wall green it just grated on me so much. A perfectly straight paint line (done with tape and spirit level) but looks wonky to the eye. Later, we decided to add picture rails to the entire upstairs to give that clean line. Fake it ’till you make it. Picture rails can often shorten a room but in our case I think it did the opposite because your eye wasn’t drawn to the wonky ceiling anymore. A slapping of panelled wallpaper and deep burgundy paint gave the room a refresh, but it was never what we considered finished.
WHAT WE’LL TAKE
An interesting one really as we’re not taking our bed. It has been moved around so much that it’s actually falling apart so in the new house it will be just the mattress on the floor for a while (new one is on order but won’t arrive until Christmas, GAH). The Eve mattress however will very much be our saviour, as it has been all year. It’s genuinely one of the greatest home items we own and I’ve got a full video on that coming soon.
The wardrobes? Also not coming. They’ve been binned. The thing about much of Ikea’s MALM range, it’s awesome, don’t get me wrong. So incredibly versatile. Customisable. But if you take it apart once, it loses so much of its integrity. So they’ve had to go. Thankfully, the new house has wardrobes, hoorah!
We’re leaving behind the overbed storage, but taking pretty much everything else, from my glam gold mirror (a steal from TK Maxx), my dressing table and bedside tables. I will probably replace them all in time but replacing furniture is expensive so these will come in handy for storage until we can afford to redecorate next time around.
HIGHLIGHTS
I have plenty of fond memories of this room. Mostly, because it was the place we’d hide away when the rest of the renovations were ongoing. Those nights staring out at the moon from my bed will always give me a smile. You might not know this unless you’ve read my blog from the beginning, but one of our neighbour’s cats would sneak in on the odd day and we’d often find her perched on the end of our bed. On one particular day, before our kitchen reno started, the bricks arrived and were placed so tall on our front garden that the cats of the neighbourhood would sit on top, and look into our bedroom. Creepy as it sounds, it was a wake-up I’ll not forget in a hurry.
THE HONEST BITS
The wardrobes without doors have been a particular highlight. I know. Let’s not sugar coat it. It’s a shit tip, as we say up here in the North. Note in the picture how there aren’t any? Yeah we could never quite afford them. Some people forget how expensive it is for the finishing touches. We spent such an enormous amount of money on basics such as plaster and heating, that often this room looked a mess anyway because we couldn’t afford to fully finish it. You will have always seen sticky fingerprints in here, or smudges on the mirror. Truth be told, I would always always choose to have an extra 5 minutes in bed snuggling my little lady than rushing her away to clean the mirrors. That might drive some people wild, but that’s just how I feel.
(In her defense, it turns out she was trying to dust our mirrors with my makeup brushes which would explain my recent adult acne – cheers kiddo!)
There have been plenty of flops in here, but mostly I’ve loved experimenting. Rather than thinking what I’d change if I could do it all over again, instead I’m going to take those learning through to the new house. But the real winner for me was the final colour. Burgundy. I bloody loved it.
