We came to do the bedrooms after the majority of the work in the three most demanding rooms of the house – Kitchen, Utility Room and Bathroom – was completed. In comparison, these rooms are far easier by nature.
When I was writing about my own place, I covered each of the two bedrooms in a fair bit of detail. This time, I am just going to cover all three bedrooms in one post, seeing as it’s just the exact same work done three times.
Let’s start with some “before” photos…
We accepted the fact that the bedrooms are small. There were initially far bigger plans for this house, involving Bedrooms 1 and 2 being extended into the garage and for a new garage to be built out the front, but plans were scaled back due to a need to get the project done as soon as possible and the pandemic causing difficulties with contractors and building supplies.
The size of Bedroom 1 in particular is disappointing (I think even my Bedroom 1 is bigger), but we decided to use what we had in the smartest way possible.
There was some quite dated friezes in the bedrooms. Once we had some extra electrical sockets fitted we broke out the steamer and stripped them all off.
I had the job of… switching the thing on and off as needed and cleaning up the mess. And making the tea.
Amazingly, the bedrooms had just one single (as in, not double) electrical socket, so we equipped the rooms with more as well as a TV socket in all three.
Once we replastered where the new sockets were put in, it was onto painting the walls. We used grey in all three. It’s very much the new magnolia and buyers can work with it easily.
We had the radiators spray-painted black in all of these rooms, using the existing ones as they were perfectly serviceable. They just needed to be made to look newer.
Sometimes I get asked what paint we used in these rooms – it’s Valspar V700, mixed to look like the Farrow and Ball “Pavilion Grey” colour. We wanted this colour pretty much throughout the whole house, but without the Farrow and Ball price tag as that would certainly have been a budget breaker. This paint compromises very little – it’s a great colour, hard wearing and washable.
Once the skirting boards went on, it really started to feel like it was fast becoming a habitable space.
Then once the carpets were laid, we had ourselves three renovated bedrooms. Brilliant!
Soon all of these rooms will be styled out for staging. I’ll be donating some furniture from my own home for this, alongside some upcycled charity shop finds, The end result of that work will be done in a future blog post.
Until then, stay tuned!
Lx
The Norfolk Home Diaries 