Our main bedroom was one of the last bedrooms to be decorated when we moved into our house in 2012. Despite an impending arrival, we took our time over our bedroom as we knew we wanted to get things we really wanted rather making do with what we had. The room is a really odd L-shape, as the corner of it has been taken off to make a bathroom. So it was always going to be a tricky one to make use of the space. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the decor when we moved in – well, I think I do somewhere, but I can’t find it anywhere. Just picture bright, bright pink and turquoise; horizontal stripes on one wall and an eye-watering floral print on the other. It was a feat in itself just to strip the walls!

Here you can see what we tackled first: the floors. We stripped down the wooden floorboards, sanded them and varnished them. That makes it sound like a doddle. It took a while, to say the least. We had help from friends and family to get them done. Once they were sorted, we put the old carpets back down to protect them while we did the walls. The walls in this room were an absolute mess! You can see on the picture with the walls stripped the remnants left behind in one corner – holes, patchy bits and weird things where something had been plastered into the wall. After a reasonable amount of effort (on Aidan’s part, I was pregnant and not interested in DIY at all. Plus we were first time parents, so you know, fumes and dust…)

A finished room! Even over five years later, I can remember how pleased I was when this room was finally finished. We bought the fire off eBay and drove to Wrexham to pick it up. The man was selling another red one as well, and I still regret not buying it to put into the spare bedroom.

And now… I feel like I should give it a bit of a ta-dah! Let me just preface this with some words: I am an untidy person. On any given day, the bedroom is usually filled with my clothes and eBay boxes. But this weekend, I finally cleared it up, cleaned it up and took some pictures to prove how lovely it can look.

We painted the walls a combination of grey and lime green. The bed, we decided to splurge a bit (for us) and bought an Ercol bed from John Lewis. The exact version we have is no longer available on the JL website, but they do have a similar style in both double and king size. The bedding is Orla Kiely via TK Maxx but I think everything else in the room is secondhand. Oh actually, Aidan’s bedside table is from Habitat. We used to have a really good Habitat clearance shop nearish to us. A few of our favourite pieces of furniture have come from there over the years.

Aidan made me the Duplo heart at Valentine’s a couple of years ago. It’s not moved since, apart from when one of the kids decides to change it slightly. The kissing couple came from Germany. I can’t remember where the mirror came from, but it’s a G-plan style one from the 60s. The original plan was to cover the whole wall with all different shaped versions of these mirrors, but that never happened. I quite like our wonky mirror though.

I’m afraid a bit of detritus still crept in… Usually this set of drawers is completely covered with junk so I’m doing my best to keep it relatively clear. My pile of stuff to sell is just visible to the right still. I’m sorry, it has to go somewhere!

More retro things! The egg chair should have had its own post by now: that was a Christmas present from Aidan years ago. I always intended to use it for breastfeeding in, but it’s impossible to get out of quietly or while holding a baby! So it’s a lovely decorative feature and not-so-occasional dumping ground for my clothes. The wardrobe is a G-plan one. We deliberated about one on eBay for ages. It was £150 and we couldn’t decide if it was amazing, really worth it or not… blah, blah, blah. Then we found one in a local charity shop for £20. Twenty pounds! The door doesn’t close, but I can live with that for twenty quid! The giant lamp also came from Germany. Aidan actually cleaned it properly last week and it looks amazing.

My bedside table wasn’t deliberately chosen to go in here. It was meant to be in Corliss’ room, but it’s too big. Now I’ve been using it for so long, I’d need something of a similar size to replace it so I might just eventually paint this one.

I’ve always got a random assortment of books on the go. At the moment, I’ve got lots of Science Fiction, Stephen King, the two Lifestyle Illustrations books and one about language development in the Amazon jungle. Just to mix it up somewhat.