DIY Rainbow Bedroom

As you probably read, earlier this week, we are now full-steam-ahead in decorating Lara and Holly's bedroom.  As with all of our DIY projects, the process isn't a fast one because we both work during the week and have lots of exciting things to be doing at the weekend which normally take priority over decorating.  

This project has proven particularly difficult because we decided to paint the walls white as the background to our rainbow room.  White paint is all very well but when the evenings are drawing in, and the wintery weather is around, the light is very poor and it is incredibly hard to see where you've painted and where you haven't.

Work in progress (and in need of a book shelf)

So far we have painted all but one of the walls white. We have removed all of the furniture other than Lara's bed and Holly's cotbed so that we can make space for new storage solutions.  Once the painting is complete, we are going to order the girls a white bunkbed.  This is something, about which they are INCREDIBLY excited.

I've already bought most of the accessories for the room.  We are completely replacing all of the sockets and switches (which in our house have all been a bit iffy) with plain white simple jobs.  I've bought an amazing blue sky dangling light pendant for the ceiling and a pair of thick white and rainbow-starred blackout curtains from GLTC.  We are going to replace all of their current bedding with bright rainbow colours.  I plan to buy a brightly coloured rainbow decal for the wall once we have all the furniture in place and I've bought the girls each a rainbow button personalised picture to go next to their beds.

The only thing we haven't quite worked out for their room yet is storage.  Ideally we'd like a wardrobe for them to store their clothes; but space is going to be limited.  We'd also like some corner shelves to store their current reading books - what normally happens is that, over the course of a week they gather a big pile of books on the bedroom floor and have to put them all away in another room at the weekend.  I think we will wait until the bunkbed is in the room before making any hard and fast decisions on storage.

MOBIMIO—Räume für Kinder / Homify

I know this home decorating project is taking FOREVER but I'm still hopeful that it can be completed by the end of the year.

This post was written in collaboration with homify, a whole website of home decorating inspiration.  All words are my own, and my DIY project is my own!  Stay tuned for the finished bedroom photos in the coming weeks.

My Top 5 Household Best Buys

As you may know, we are currently decorating the girls' bedroom.  We've cleared their room of furniture and sold off their wobbly wardrobe so that we can start from scratch in their bedroom.  As I waved goodbye (and good riddance) to one of my most hated pieces of furniture, it made me think about what makes a lasting piece of household furniture, storage or staples?  I know for a fact that it isn't just cost that makes a household item one that lasts - I've paid lots in the past for things I've quickly had to replace but then I've also had bargain items that I bought when I first moved out of home and I'm still using now and are still oozing quality.

So, as an aid to contemplating what sort of items to buy for the girls' newly decorated bedroom, I've written up a list of the items in my house which have lasted us the longest, and have become some of the most-used household items we have owned.  I am hoping that this will help me to understand what makes them stand out from the rest.  It is interesting to see how many of them now have the girl's presence stamped all over them!  Here are my top 5 household best-buys.

1. Ikea bookcase

This was one of the first items of furniture that we bought when we first became home owners. I remember having to pay a van driver to transport them home from Ikea in Wembley to our home in Bracknell.  These bookcases are so tall that you have to anchor them to the wall to keep them from falling over but they store so many books, CDs and games that they have been able to cope with our growing and evolving collection as our family has grown.

2. Brabantia laundry basket

I remember Mr. B. giving me a funny look when I bought a Brabantia laundry basket nearly 10 years ago.  For me, the new metal and wooden laundry bin was an important part of our new decoration and I still to this day feel that it makes the bedroom or hallway look stylish - it is a smart way of storing laundry which can sometimes be an unsightly afterthought in a room.

3. Oak bookcase

We LOVE this oak bookcase which was bought for us as a house warming gift ten years ago from a local furniture supplier. In our pre-parent days this used to house recipe books.  Now it hosts whats left of our grown-up book collection and is hidden away in the spare room but it is such a smooth and sturdy piece of furniture that I wouldn't want to rehome it any time soon.

4. Wooden mirror

Mr. B. and I were given this huuuuge wooden mirror as a wedding present. We are currently planning our new living room and we are both keen that this mirror remains a central part of our living area.  It is chunky and bold but natural at the same time. 

5. Boxer Bed

Our bed came with us when we moved house, even though it was originally bought for a very specific room dimension in our old house where space was limited.  It is a Boxer Bed which is surprisingly high because it features, underneath it, lots of different sized drawers for loads of storage.  It even hides away two bedside tables!

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post but that doesn't stop it being fun to read.

Rainbow Bedroom - Getting started with our latest DIY project

Well, it has finally started.  Mr. B. and I have started work on our latest DIY project - a total change of style for the girl's bedroom.  Goodbye girly pinks and purples, hello Rainbow bedroom! I've been collecting ideas for a few months and finally we have taken our first steps to making it happen. We've sanded, filled and scrubbed the walls ready for painting.  I can't wait to share it with you when we are done (P.S. this could be some months away!)

Follow Emma Button's board Rainbow Bedroom on Pinterest.

It is going to be a massive change to Lara and Holly's bedroom but with really minimal effort.  Mr. B. and I have so little spare time at the weekends that we can only manage a few small tasks every weekend and it may take us some months to complete but we are planning on simply re-painting, fitting a new curtain pole and curtains, replacing the plug sockets, installing a smoke alarm and then adding in a bunkbed and a wardrobe to keep the room tidy and simple.

BEFORE!

Because we don't have a lot of time or cash to spend on home improvements, we have opted for some simple DIY hacks.  We've chosen white walls which means we can buy plain white emulsion paint in bulk to save a few pennies.  We've also roped the girls into sanding and washing the walls! Rather than painting a rainbow mural, I'm planning a stick-on wall decal.  We've also collected a few

Mr. B. is desperate to get the girl's bedroom done and dusted so that we can move on to our grander plans.  I think he is struggling to get into the mindset of a quick bedroom re-paint when he knows that we have a lets-knock-all-the-walls-down-and-spend-our-life-savings type of project just ahead of us.

We are planning on opening up the whole of the downstairs of our house and adding a conservatory.  Obviously it is going to take some planning and a couple of years of heavy saving to make it a reality.  When you're planning a home improvement project on this scale, you need to think about the impact on your house insurance and your mortgage so it isn't a project that we undertake lightly.  I don't think that our grand plans for the downstairs of the house will be do-it-yourself though, it seems like a bit too much for us to take on.  For now, I'm just trying to concentrate on getting the girl's bedroom complete and saving those pennies for our future building project!

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post but that doesn't stop it being fun to read. DIY updates coming soon!

My British Gas Home Truths

If you are an avid reader of Mellow Mummy then you will know that 2014 was the year in which we had to re-decorate rather unexpectedly.  As I look back now through my blog posts for the past 12 months I can see that we had promised ourselves that we would redecorate the hallway as one of our new year's resolutions - well, we did that AND SOME!

Our house has always been planned as a long-term investment.  A house that was more or less ship-shape but which could be updated one room at a time over a long period as we evolve with it.  Year one we decorated our bedroom, year two the garden, year three the playroom and year four was intended to be the hallway.  Then our rather highly-strung two year old left the tap running one day and all our plans had to change.

   

After the flood we had to re-floor the entire downstairs of the house.  The hallway redecorations were suddenly accelerated and we had to re-fit the downstairs bathroom.  We took the opportunity to entirely redecorate the downstairs bathroom and, given that we were going to have to live in bathroom chaos for several weeks, we decided to bring forward our plans for year five - replace the upstairs bathroom too!

  

British Gas have worked with Channel 4 to put together a portal of videos which show what a home means to different people in their Home Truths Hub.  As an example, this family had to have a rethink about their home when they become proud parents of triplets!

Our house is slowly ticking over.  It isn't a project.  It is a house that can change at a leisurely pace as our tastes change and as our family needs change.  In 2015 we will spend a bit more time looking after the garden and save up some money for some big changes to the main living spaces.  I'm still holding off updating the girl's bedroom until they grow out of the pink stage!

This post was produced in collaboration with British Gas.

Graham & Brown Children's Room Decorations Review

An interesting thing happened this weekend.  A bit of an experiment.  I'm not sure if it is going to be a total disaster or a moment of genius.  We moved the two girls into the same bedroom!  It is something we have been considering doing for a little while now and we were vaguely aiming for Christmas but things were sped up a bit after our recent self-catering holiday on which the girls shared a room with some success.  To make the "new" room feel like home, the girls were sent a few room decorations from Graham & Brown as a gift to give their bedroom a bit of character.

Because the room move is a bit of an experiment we aren't planning on totally redecorating or painting the girls room right now but we did want to give it a bit of a refresh and some simple wall decorations like these Lemon Ribbon Animal designs from Graham & Brown are a great idea for a quick (or temporary) change of style in a kids room.

I applied a line of these Lemon Ribbon Animal Sancturary Mini Foam Elements across the top and sides of each of the girls' beds.  Each foam piece is between 5 and 15cm tall.  The set contains 24 foam shapes and lots of sticky foam pads with which to attach them.  At present, I'm trying not to think about how hard it will be to remove the foam pads when we do eventually decide to redecorate the room at some point in the future (although I am reliably informed that steam will help)!  Because the Lemon Ribbon foam animal shape wall stickers apply using sticky pads, they are very easy to put up and don't require any tools (or skill!)

At the edge of the bedroom there was a few marks where the previous owners obviously had a mirror.  The wall has been filled and could really do with painting so in order to detract from the marks, I placed a line of canvas blocks in a matching Lemon Ribbon design.  The Lemon Ribbon Animal Sancturary Canvas Blocks are 15 cm square and have a single hole in the back of the block that you can use to hang on a picture hook.  The blocks are very light.  Each has an image featuring the same fun pink and purple creatures from the Lemon Ribbon design but each block is slightly different.

I love the Lemon Ribbon animal designs because they are girly without being branded (my girls have enough Peppa Pig and Disney Princess stuff already thank you!)  I think they nicely bridge the toddler - girl age gap between my two daughters.  The range also includes a lamp, wall stickers and wall paper.

There are lots of different wall art, wall stickers and kids decor ideas at Graham & Brown - lots of recognisable kids characters along with beautiful, slightly different designs like these.

Red Candy Children's Wall Stickers

Since I first discovered Red Candy's range of amazing children's wall stickers, I've really wanted to try them out.  Red Candy contacted us at an opportune moment - Lara's room is looking a bit worse for wear at present but I'm loathe to completely redecorate it right now as I don't think Lara has quite grown out of her pink fairy princess stage yet.  Wall stickers seemed like a great way to breathe a bit of life into Lara's room without a total redesign.

We (OK, Lara) chose this Fairy Wall Sticker in a deep pink colour to contrast with the flowery pink of her bedroom walls.  The sticker is one of the smallest that Red Candy offer and costs just £23.  This fairy wall sticker is available in lots of different colours including green, orange and silver - certainly not just pink!

When the sticker arrived it was rolled up in a cardboard tube to protect it (there were staples at the top which I had to remove carefully to avoid damaging the sticker).  The sticker is made by the Spin collective and there are lots of designs from their range on the Red Candy website and they are ALL stunning.  From rainbows to robots. Height charts, slogans and glow-in-the-dark specials. I could decorate an entire house with them!

To put the sticker on Lara's wall was pretty straightfoward.  We quickly cleaned the wall first to make sure it wasn't gunky (it's a good job we did because the wall WAS gunky!). The sticker came with a little plastic squeegee; to start, we had to run the squeegee over the sticker to loosen it from its backing before peeling off the backing paper.  Lara and I carefully placed the sticker onto the wall and she used the tool to press out all of the bubbles from the centre, outwards.

We had to leave the sticker for 10 minutes to get a good grip on the wall before we could remove the plastic cover.  Because the fairy design was very intricate this was a little tricky in the finer details where I had to press the sticker back carefully to the wall but it still wasn't that hard.  In fact, the whole process took less than 15 minutes and I'm really impressed with the result.

Lara is over the moon with her new bedroom wall and her little sister seemed to like it too!  It is such a small change to her room but somehow makes it feel fresh and new.  This should see us through until the two girls are old enough that we decide to move them into a bedroom together. And, should Lara suddenly decide that she is no longer into princesses and fairies, we can simply peel the sticker off.  Genius.

The Playroom - A Clock From Red Candy

The total re-invention of our box-room as a playroom is coming on well.  OK, it's coming on slowly.  I get approximately 1 hour a week to spend on painting the walls so it is some weeks away from being ready to reveal to you but I've been collecting ideas and inspiration on a Pinterest board I can share and I've discovered a few fantastic items that I just HAD to have in the new room.

The Nuby green paper lampshade was bought within seconds of me seeing the photo on Pinterest!  And this clock from Red Candy, likewise!  Red Candy is a website full of shiny red things for the home; they asked me to take a look through their products to see what took my fancy and despite being wildly tempted by some bright red toilet paper, I couldn't help but be drawn to their collection of clocks as I really wanted a clock on the wall of the play room to help the girls learn to tell the time and to provide a centre-piece for the wall.

All of their clocks were awesome.  In fact, across the entire website, there aren't many things I don't want!  Red Candy isn't just about red things.  OK, there are a lot of red things... housewares for the kitchen, living room and dining room... but there are all sorts of other non-red things too!  I had just purchased some wall stickers for the playroom but I tell you what, the range of childrens wall sticker AND grown-up wall stickers on Red Candy is pretty damn awesome.  I could quite happily decorate about 10 different styles of playroom from their range.

Anyway... the olive green P:ip wall clock from Koziol was the perfect thing to come and live in the new playroom.  The natural green colour will work well with the nature and wildlife theme that I'm planning and the tiny animal shapes are very cute and will co-ordinate well.  I love this clock, not only because it is huuuuuge (but not heavy because it is plastic) but because it is quirky.  The clock isn't traditional in any sense but because the numbers are clearly legible, I can use it to help teach Lara to tell the time.

The P:ip clock takes AA batteries and has a simple wall fastening that requires a wall hook.  For me, it is perfect.

You can follow Red Candy on facebook and twitter.

Note: RedCandy contributed to the cost of the clock for the purposes of my review but I would happily have paid full price!