Just before lockdown I had started making changes in Mimi’s room to make it work better for her age. When we moved to our house she was one and we basically moved her baby nursery from the flat straight into the house without making a single change – same colours, furniture, storage (you can see what the room looked like as soon as we moved in here and you can see Mimi’s nursery in our old flat here). That was fine for a while but since she turned three she has become much more interested in playing independently, imaginary play and dressing up (obsessed!) and her bedroom has become much more of a hub to play, which it never really had been as she previously just wanted to be wherever I was. Unfortunately, I got stuck mid way through making the changes when lockdown started so it’s all a bit of higgledy piggledy mess at the moment.
I made a big change by selling the large chest of drawers in her room to create space for toys. The drawers had been perfect for her nursery as it provided a changing area and so much great storage for nappies, baby clothes, blankets. However, it took up so much space and Mimi’s clothes are so much bigger now that we need some hanging space and she is at that stage that she wants to dress herself every day and she had started climbing up the drawers to get to the top ones (!).
As with any change like this it creates the decorating domino effect. We had removed shelves in the alcove to make way for the wardrobe and we now had a blank wall available for toy storage and play.
I bought a couple of inexpensive IKEA Trofast units with the money I got for selling the drawers to provide toy storage and I positioned them in such a way that it created a dressing up nook for Mimi as this is her absolute favourite pass time – ten changes of outfit a day is not unusual. I attached a street-find rail on to the bottom of the wall mounted unit (these wall drawers are mainly used for stuff I don’t want Mimi to be able to reach) for her costumes and I stuck a £5 mirror panel onto the wall. I had planned to paint them and organise them all but then lockdown came and priorities changed so it has stayed as it is.
We removed the picture ledges we had used to store books as Mimi now reads more paperbacks and she loves getting a big pile of books from the library every week so the volume of books and the type was not really suitable for the ledges any longer; to get to one she would inevitably pull all the others down with it. We were very lucky to be gifted the perfect replacement book shelf from Tidy Books that is super slim and could be placed behind the bedroom door and make use of completely dead space.
My real focus is thinking of ways to tie this space together and make it look more cohesive as it is all very thrown together at the moment. Obviously I need to to fill in holes left by shelves and move the large picture but I need to make decisions about possibly painting this wall and the furniture. At the moment I am deliberating over painting the whole room and the wooden furniture Slipper Satin to soften the feel of the room. The other alternative is to use Light Blue, which is the same colour as the door and skirting and I have left over paint, to do just half the wall, which would be a temporary fix during lockdown when we are so busy doing the garden. Alternatively, and this is Mimi’s preference, we could change it all and use a pink all the way round the room and change the wood work colour. Decisions, decisions.
I will write another blog post with some children’s bedrooms that I love to give you an idea of the changes I would like to make once life gets back to normal. Did anyone else get stuck in the middle of a decorating job when lockdown came?
Katy x
*Tidy Books very kindly gifted me their plain kids bookshelf