A Spare Room With A View

Our most recent project has been to swap George’s room and the spare room.

After some sorting and wardrobe building George moved into his new room over the summer holidays, so we have been de-Georging his old room and making it habitable for all the guests we have coming to stay.

Hah! We never have people coming to stay, but you never know!

I was allocated the task of decorating. My twitter followers had to put up with me moaning about how it dragged on. You see, Edwardians, they loved their painted woodwork, so our house is crammed with more picture rails, deep skirtings, architraves and fitted cupboards than you can shake a painty stick at. This meant lots of sanding down, priming and top coating to ensure the heinous yellowy cream gloss paint got covered entirely. I wanted the walls to be a cool grey. The paint we chose in the end was called Chic Shadow. A bit 80’s sounding, Dulux, but it works just fine, especially against the bright white of the newly painted original cast iron fireplace and some fresh new bedding.

As the room still has a lot of original features we chose a traditional metal bedstead and, for the moment, the hefty chests of drawers that we rescued from the army surplus store nearby are sticking around…until we decide to swap or paint them. It’s also a good home for my lovely walnut and lime jewellery box that Ed made me a few years ago.

Ed spent a day in the workshop designing and making a couple of simple, but elegant beech bedside tables. I gave them a couple of coats of lime wax to blend them in to the colour scheme and now they are ready to receive coffee stains, tissue boxes and iPhone chargers.

The room has a most excellent view across the valley, better than our room to be honest. I can’t deny that I occasionally go and sit in there for no better reason than to watch the tiny little milk tankers visiting the wee dairy farms on the distant hillside.

Ed tells me that they are not tiny, they are just far away. But I like them anyway.

One of my favourite additions is a framed print of my favourite Instagrams of the year. Every photo holds a memory so it makes me smile every time I look at it.

So there you go. Spare room, pretty much complete. Now there really is no excuse.
The kitchen must be next.