Decorating Our Bedroom, Part 2

With our Made To Measure Wardrobes now installed and painted (which you can read about here in Part 1 decorating our bedroom), the next step was to get some character, and begin decorating our bedroom.

This week is Sleep Awareness Week (10-16 March 2019) and there’s nothing better than having a bedroom that feels relaxing calm and stress free to get a good night’s sleep.

We had lived in our bedroom for over two years being cluttered and unfinished.

I can honestly say I didn’t really enjoy going to bed, or want to unwind in that room.

After we finished painting our made to measure wardrobe, there were a few months before we began decorating our bedroom with paint and wallpaper. But this gave me some time to put the finishing touches to how the bedroom would look once it was complete. Over the course of the year (since February when the wardrobe was installed) I had finally began to visualise how I wanted our bedroom to look.

Our bedroom is a really decent size, yet it has a weird/quirky aspect to it. There is one wall that juts out on the left hand side, as you walk into our room. This is because this wall is apart of our stairway walls. This wall in particular has baffled me with what to do when decorating it and the room. As well as reflect how the decorating/styling is utilised for the rest of the room.

Being a lover for a feature wall, which works really well in our small two up, two down home it was either a toss up to wallpaper this awkward wall. Or paint it in a bold/striking colour to enhance and make this area a feature of the room.

For the bedroom, I knew I wanted to create a calm and relaxing, yet romantic environment.

As well as going a little darker in its colour palette compared to the rest of the house.

I have been really drawn to a navy and blush combination for some time now. I fell in love with this colour palette whilst researching new colours ways for my pattern designs. In particular this looked extremely effective on the Dotty Bird pattern design.

So as easy as that (after two years of not feeling inspired for decorating our bedroom at all!), my mind was made up.

Dotty Bird was to be the feature pattern in the bedroom, and a navy and blush colour palette was to be the choice for decorating our bedroom.

To decide what I do with the awkward accent wall, I put a sample of my Dotty Bird wallpaper up, alongside a few navy paint samples to decide which I go for. After living with these up for a few days, it was obvious to me that wallpaper should be used for this accent wall in order to seem a soft calming wall as you walk through the door. I think if it was painted navy it would look at bit too dark and moody, which is not what I wanted from the offset.

But I did love the navy paint idea and found out that blue symbolises calmness and serenity. Perfect for the style and environment I wanted to create for decorating our bedroom.

I decided to put some paint samples up on the wall behind our bed to create a second statement feature wall. This would mean the Dotty Bird wallpaper and the navy wall would sit side by side making a lovely feature for the main area of the bedroom.

I wasn’t keen on painting the whole room in navy or another blue/grey. Instead I wanted to select a complimenting light pink to go with the blush found in the Dotty Bird wallpaper.

I chose to go for a lighter shade to keep the room looking fresh, and to compliment the style of the rest of the house as well.

Pink is slowly becoming a new neutral colour within interiors. Sadly there are some people out there (i.e. stereotypically the husbands/partners/boyfriends) who really don’t like the idea of having pink in the home. Which is a shame, because there are so many beautiful tones and hues to choose from.

However by choosing a lighter tone of pink, takes away the immediate ‘overly feminine’ feeling. Instead, light pink can enhance the romance, whilst feeling soothing and comfortable.

When doing my paint research, I knew I wanted a particular colour hue for both the navy and light pink. For the rest of the house, I’ve been using Dulux. However, for this particular project they didn’t have a range that matched to the Dotty Bird colours.

Instead I decided to have a look into Valspar’s paint range, because they have a huge library of colours. And it was here that I found my two paint colours, to compliment the Dotty Bird wallpaper colourway.

I’ve never used Valspar before, and I absolutely loved working with their paint. It seemed to not have any fumes whilst painting with it, it went onto the walls really well, and the coverage went far. I ended up covering the walls in two coats of paint, with the second could really enhanced the colour for both options.

For the Navy feature wall I went with ‘Monsoon Nights’. For the rest of the bedroom walls I chose ‘Angel’s Sigh’.

Once all was painted and dry, it was next to move on to installing my Dotty Bird Wallpaper. Before I began to decorate our bedroom, I screen printed our feature wallpaper, ready to install after painting.

The way my screen print wallpaper works is very easy in terms of production.

It’s a made to measure process, where individual panels are hand screen printed (by yours truly) in panels, with guidelines provided to show how your wallpaper falls across the wall/s.

The beauty behind my screen print wallpaper being provided in panels, is that it created less paper wastage. I design each panel to fit your wall space, with room for a little excess to line up on the wall.

This means the pattern repeat is worked out down and across the wall for you, with the panels labeled accordingly. All you/your wallpaper installer has to do it follow my guidelines and diagram to create a beautiful (and effortless) feature wall.

Anyway, back to decorating our bedroom!

Installing my Dotty Bird wallpaper took a little longer that thought, due to the accent corner, and how the panels fell across the wall. However, that was the only challenge I faced, and in my opinion it was a great one to have for me to further my experience with wallpaper hanging.

A few hours down, and the Dotty Bird feature wallpaper installation was complete. Straight away I knew this bedroom was now looking the best it has ever looked. Over the course of one week our bedroom had gone from a dull lining paper coloured room, to a calm, relaxing and inviting bedroom that I had been imagining for over half a year.

My vision for our bedroom has slowly been coming to life since. With the mirrored feature wardrobe, and all walls painted and wallpapered, my inspiration for the final finishing touches has slowly been coming together.

This will be in a final blog post very soon, sharing how I have styled our bedroom to create a relaxing and romantic haven.

In the meantime do make sure you read Part 1 of decorating our bedroom, to see what this room looked like when we first moved in (nearly three years ago).

Plus if you have any questions about the Dotty Bird wallpaper, or would like a sample for your own dream bedroom, please get in contact.