Room Tour: Bella's Bedroom

Decorating Bella's bedroom has certainly had it's challenges. The first is that it's small; not as small as the boxroom in our old house, but very definitely a single room not a double. The second challenge (for me) is that Bella is eight and a half, independent, opinionated, and knows her own mind. I try to impose my decorating will on her - really, I do - and she just shrugs. "Don't like it." she says of numerous pictures of well styled spaces I show her. "No. Boring," to the bedding set I like. "No, it's babyish" to the cloud cushion cover I want to make her. We go back and forth until we reach some kind of compromise.

From the moment we moved in and scraped off the Mickey Mouse wallpaper she wanted that wall to be blue, and the shade to her exact specifications. The rest of the walls are the same off white that we've used in most of the rooms (and works well in this north-east facing room) and the pale carpet was already here, we just cleaned it. 

The bed is the other half of the bunk beds she used to share with Angus, covered with a mixture of supermarket bedding and cushions I've made. The little filing cabinet from IKEA is a brilliant bedside cabinet as the drawers can be filled with all manner of loom bands, hair clips and what not.

Hooks on the back of the door are essential if you're short on space, and a must for bags, dressing gowns and all the things that wont fit into her already jammed wardrobe, like plastic Hawaiian flower necklaces. 

As in Angus's room, a sheet of gift wrap is hung above the bed as a print. I love this idea for bringing colour to walls as it's so cheap and versatile and can be changed easily. This sheet of paper has since been moved to Angus's room and we now have a piece of wrapping paper covered in butterflies in it's place. I used these poster hangers.

It was essential to put a bookcase in here somewhere and so, when you're short on space you go upwards, and we just squeezed a tall, thin Billy bookcase into the gap between the end of the bed and the window. 

Opposite the bed is a wardrobe, desk and some shelves. You'll notice that most of the furniture is IKEA; it's not going to last forever but it'll do for now. The shelves hold all kinds of much loved and precious things. 

There isn't space for a chest of drawers so all clothes are hung or folded and stored in those boxes. I was putting some clothes away in that wardrobe earlier today and was confused as to why everything was muddled - school uniform, t-shirts, dresses all mixed in together. Then I stopped and smiled when I realised that everything had been arranged by colour. She has her own system and who am I to say mine is better. 

Are you wondering where all her toys are? It is suspiciously tidy, I know. Two huge drawers under her bed hold masses of stuff and the bigger items live downstairs in either the office or spare room. We had to compromise - even if we built a cabin bed this room wouldn't be big enough to hold all her toys. 

I just want to mention these brilliant triangle wall stickers we used to decorate Bella's wardrobe and bedroom doors. They are from Caroline South's etsy shop and they are ace. Easy to stick and unstick, they can be used and reused on walls and furniture and are a lovely inexpensive way to add a bit of colour or individuality to IKEA furniture, among other things. We went for a sort of bunting look here.

We also used some in Angus's room, to highlight the angle of the sloped roof above his chest of drawers. 

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It's lovely to have the time to take some photos and write about our home and what we've done to it. It occurred to me that I haven't really shown you a lot of our house yet, since we are constantly doing work on it and nothing is finished, but if I wait until it's done I'll be waiting forever. No-one's home is ever finished, is it, and wouldn't that be boring? Who wants to live in a show home? Not me, anyway. So I'll have to get cracking and take some more photos this summer and you can see it in it's real, unfinished (if slightly tidier than usual) state.