Posted By Laura in Featured, In the Home, Just for You | 2 comments

When we bought our house back in 1992, it had been decorated throughout by the previous couple – everything was neat and tidy, and in bland late 80’s taste.
We slowly re-decorated most of the rooms, pretty much as driven to by necessity: a ceiling came down thanks to a burst radiator pipe, a ceiling came down thanks to a shower leak, a pregnancy happened so a spare room had to be made into a nursery… you get the idea.

The third bedroom is a tiny little L-shape; originally of course our 1920’s house had no inside bathroom, so when one was installed they simply took a square out of one of the bedrooms – leaving an L shape behind…
Yes, that’s the room the daughter, who as the lastborn got last dibs on bedrooms, has been in since she was two.
And yes, it’s less than 6′ wide – if you stand in the middle you can touch both walls at the same time.Before she was born it belonged to son no.3, and in a temporary makeover attempt we painted the 80’s peach walls a nice bright green and added wall stickers.That ‘temporary’ fix was still there 9 years later… and our girl is 7 now. She was filling her beloved cotbed end-to-end, and had no storage for any of her things except placing them on the 1980’s peach carpet (which is now seriously thin and skanky).

The view from the door – note the delicious green, the skanky carpet, and that dead space of the ‘passage’ entrance

And inside, this is what she gets. Big, no? Bear in mind that’s a cotbed, not actually a full-sized bed. Her storage system is her floor, and the curtains are knotted up to allow some light in during the day.

So when Carpetright asked if we’d like to review a bed in the same week that Cormar asked us if we’d like to feature some of their carpet, we felt the Universe was probably telling us something.
And like the good parents we’re not very often able to be, we rolled up our sleeves and got to planning.
Stage one – prepare the basics.
Emptying the room is a monstrous task in itself  – it never ceases to amaze me the sheer amount of stuff one small child can collate. And squeak in dismay at the throwing out of, too.

one tiny kids room, looking rather sad and forlorn. And one 80’s carpet looking properly skanky.

Once the room was clear we could see the task ahead. First job was the walls.
Dulux had sent us all the paint we needed – and first job was the tin of undercoat to lose that lurid green. Astonishingly, just one coat gave a great finish – we used up the can on a second covering, but it was probably unnecessary, the basecoat was exactly what we needed as we were going from a strong green to the palest of whites and pinks.

The paint Dulux strongly suggested we use was from the Light & Space range, which is designed to make any room feel brighter and more spacious. It works with light-reflective particles which reflect up to twice as much light back into your room, when compared to conventional emulsion paints. This tiny space neeeds as much light as it can get, so we were sold straight away!

We started with the pink wall – we didn’t want to finish up with a strong ‘princess effect’, so had opted for Spring Rose, which turned out to be a beautifully soft shade of shell pink – exactly what we wanted. Keeping the bright-is-good theme, the rest of the walls were going to be a simple and bright white – we opted for Frosted Dawn, which is subtly off-white (though far more white than it looks on the Dulux web site), and warms and softens the feel of the room.
The paint went on the walls beautifully, and the colour is soft and gentle, but warm and oh so pretty after all that green! We ended up giving the pink wall maybe 4 coats, purely because we had a couple of stains that insisted on breaking through every layer. But it paints beautifully and easily, dries incredibly quickly, and all the coats were completed and dried in one afternoon.
The rest of the walls were equally as simple in the white, the paint going on smoothly and evenly, and drying super fast to an excellent finish.

I know, it’s astonishing the difference it makes, isn’t it?

We didn’t begin clearing the room until after lunch, and by early evening the walls were complete ( we were ignoring the ceiling, it was good enough as it was!), and we were ready for the paintwork.
Next day was the turn of the gloss paint ( we bought the new quick drying water-based stuff, which is ace and doesn’t smell!), and then the room was ready for the carpet.
Bear had actually been reluctant to have her room redecorated (for ‘reluctant’ read regular late night heaving sobfests of despair at the loss of her bed and the lurid green walls…), so once the walls were changed we allowed her in to see. We needed to make sure she felt part of the process, and wasn’t presented with a finished rom which she had no connection with at all. She walked in, gazed open-mouthed, and let it sink in for a minute. Then declared “I thought the pink might be a bit pinker….”
*mutters about ungrateful children*
Later, when snuggled up for her bedtime story on the floor of her big brothers room she did whisper, however, that the new white walls “look beautiful Mummy”.
I think fear of change was finally giving way to excitement…
But from then on she was banned.
We had supplanted the green in her brain, but now we wanted to keep the details to ourselves, and present the finished room as a gift…

Working on top of the basecoat, we used one tin of the Spring Rose (and had LOADS left over which we used on shelves etc) and two tins of the Frosted Dawn.

The Light + Space range comes in 2.5l cans, and is priced at around £26 – we noticed that currently Wickes have it on offer at 3 for 2, which is a GREAT deal).