We need to get at that banana stand...
So, I've had a couple of people ask me where I got the duvet cover in this photo:
And the answer is La Redoute! It's a great French company that sells clothes and home decor [I may have just bought some clothes from there...], and I'm a little bit obsessed. It took me months to find this duvet cover. Pathetic, I know, but I had this whole idea of what I wanted the room to look like, and I didn't want to get anything too girly [for D's sake], but it needed to be light and airy feeling. It ended up costing us about £35 in the end, which wasn't too bad.
It got me thinking about how much we spent on furniture, etc. when we moved, and it wasn't actually all that much. We needed to move somewhere outside of the city because of the little monster, and we really needed a place with at least 2 bedrooms [not that we use more than one at the moment, but that's beside the point...], and we ended up finding one with three! Perfect. We love having the spare room for when my parents come to visit [or if anyone else comes to visit since we live so far out of the city], and once the little guy gets a bit bigger he will actually sleep in his own room, which will probably be more traumatizing for me than him, since even when I put him in there for a nap I'm checking on him every 10 minutes to make sure he's still breathing [neurotic, I know...].
For today, we'll start with a budget breakdown of the master bedroom, since it's where we bought the most new stuff. We ended up doing that room last when we moved in, because we knew we wanted a new bed, and didn't want to be moving our old bed back and forth since I was all full of baby by that point. This was my inspiration [and I say 'my' inspiration because D couldn't have cared less... he trusts me... for the most part]:
from Coastal Living.
1. Painting the walls: We got all of our paint from Wickes, which sells it's own name brand stuff. I wasn't sure when we started the nursery, but that turned out great, so we went ahead with the master bedroom. The color we ended up choosing was Nickel, and we love the way it turned out. I was going through a bit of a gray phase at the time, but it looks great [SO much better than the nasty cream color that was there before]. We did all of the skirting, dado rail, and wardrobes in a satin white, since they were in need of a lot of love as well. Total paint cost: £45 [7.5 liters in total].
3. Headboard. This is my shining moment in the bedroom, it only cost £10.49, and took me 20 minutes to put up. A little backstory: I wan't actually planning on doing this... I was planning on doing this [from Martha Stewart]:
Cute, right? I wanted to have a little desk area on the opposite side of the room between the windows, but I was having a really hard time finding a desk that would fit the space that didn't cost a fortune. Plus, I'm impatient when it comes to doing stuff. If I have a project that I'm really into, I want to do it immediately, and the idea of painting the shutters and putting them up on the wall without a desk or something under it for god knows how long drove me crazy. Ridiculous, I know. So instead of doing that, I decided to make them into a headboard.I bought the shutters on ebay for a grand total of 50p. Awesome! I had to pay £9.99 for shipping, but a pair of shutters for £10.49 was pretty good. I had originally wanted to put up some kind of barn door, or something up as a headboard anyway, so the shutters were perfect. They needed a little cleaning up, but that was easy enough to do with a pan brush and some soapy water. Once they were dry, I just screwed a 1x4 to the wall [we already had this, since I bought one to make a shelf in our old place] and then screwed the shutters into that end to end. I think they look pretty cool, and the hubs always thinks I'm 'clever' when I do stuff like that... he wasn't sure what I was doing at first, but he always comes around when he sees the finished product.
4. Bedding. The duvet cover was from La Redoute [as before], mattress protector [waterproof, just in case my water broke in bed] and pillow cases from Argos, fitted sheet from John Lewis. Total cost: £60.
5. Cushions. We already owned these. I had bought them at Ikea when I moved to Whitechapel with a university friend over 6 years ago.
6. Bedside tables. This was cool too. I couldn't find any bedsides that I liked, because I wanted them to be a funky color, but high enough for our bed [which is about 3 feet of the ground]. After scouring the internet, I still couldn't find anything, so I dragged Dan to the furniture thrift store, and we found these two battered white bedside tables for £10 each. Jackpot! He carried them home on the bus [delivery was £18... no, thank you!], and I got to work. I removed the doors, and used two tester pots of 'Pea' from Wickes [as before] and painted the carcass. I then took some wallpaper that I had found at work [from Cole & Son] and covered the doors and the upper shelf to add a little bit of interest. I then reattached the knobs and doors [I had to reverse one of the doors because the both opened the same way, which seems weird if they were a set to begin with...], and voila! New bedside tables! Total cost: £22.50.
8. Dressers. We got these at Ikea. Cheapo Malm dressers at £35 a pop. Total cost: £70 [I wanted my own dresser].
9. Wardrobes. Built in! We slapped a coat of paint on as mentioned before, and my dad brought over the old door knobs from their kitchen [they re-did their kitchen a couple years ago] and replaced the crappy ones in situ while I was in labor [it was over 56 hours, so he had plenty of time!]. Free - huzzah!
10. Window treatments. Nightmare! I couldn't find anything long enough for our windows that wasn't ridiculously expensive, so I thought it would be a good idea to make my own. This would have been okay if I wasn't so Total cost for the room: £1,112.99.
YIKES! Oh well, this was definitely our most expensive room to do, but we love it. I do need to put something in between the windows. I'm thinking this [from Visual Etiquette]:
