Brindabella Bedroom Blitz – Episode #2

Remember that time we decided to completely overhaul our bedroom? The built-in wardrobe ‘holiday project’ which avalanched into painting the entire room, replacing cornice and picture rail, buying new curtains, light fitting and bed? Yeah, well I’m back with Episode #2 – only about twelve million years later! Apologies.

So where were we? We’d painted the whole room, the old sash windows, the fiddly panelled ceiling (phew!), replaced the picture rail and plastered in the fabulous new wardrobe frame, putting on the doors to the big upper section and finishing off with the internal wardrobe fittings…

Our attention turned to the floors. All throughout our house we have delightful* lino in a faux-timber effect (except in the bathroom where there’s slate tiles). It’s probably pretty practical, but not something I would choose. As we pulled up the lino to make way for the wardrobe we revealed the original floorboards hiding underneath – which were beautiful!

Thoughts of course turned immediately to sanding and polishing them, heck let’s do the whole house! Can you sense our silly frame of mind at this point?! Upon further investigation in the kitchen/dining area we discovered that the floorboards in there were less than beautiful – a mish mash of different timbers running different ways and a big ol’ concrete slab in one section where the old wood stove once stood. Not ideal. So, we won’t ever be having polished original floorboards throughout our main living/dining/kitchen area. Boo. The three bedrooms’ floorboards though are probably all in good condition, so options were to have polished boards in just the bedrooms (and eventually something else in the living/dining/kitchen, would this look funny?) or put carpet in the bedrooms, looking less mismatched if we eventually did something like a floating floor in the rest of the house. I am in team floorboards for bedrooms, Matt prefers carpet. I just couldn’t stomach covering up the beautiful boards we’d just uncovered though, so we decided to roll up the lino and expose the boards for now. They were in great condition as they were, so we didn’t sand or polish them, we figured if we were going to hire a sander etc. we might as well do Eleanor’s room and the other bedroom = a big task we just couldn’t stomach right now! At the moment I’m loving them and they will be staying as they are for the foreseeable future. At some point we will either sand and polish the boards in all the bedrooms…or put down carpet. Jury is still out.

With a beautiful new wardrobe to fill, we just needed the finishing touch – doors! Initial thoughts were to get Ikea sliding doors, or even ones from Bunnings, but everything was too modern for my liking. Nothing was really floating my boat about mirrored sliders, all a bit ho-hum stock standard, you know? Enter clever husband. We had an old door sitting in the shed (which we actually used to peg our seating tags to at our wedding and at our baby shower too) Matt’s parents had another similar vintage door from the old family home in Inverloch which was renovated a few years ago – with Matt’s brother having another similar door acquired with a random Gumtree purchase we had three vintage wooden doors, all about 100 years old. The perfect solution to my wardrobe door conundrum!

Matt’s brother’s door was painted however, so we had to strip the paint off, sand it down, oil it slightly. All three doors are a little different, but that’s great! I love them all equally, truly. Matt just lightly oiled them rather than staining them all the same, bringing out the natural wood colouring and all their different ‘personalities’. He also had to trim them down to the right size, put slider wheels in the tops and bottoms and handles, then it was just a matter of slotting them into the slider track we’d put in the wardrobe. Ta-da! Beautiful old doors on our wardrobe…

Wardrobe? Done! I set to putting all the things in there – saying goodbye to the seventy billion chests of drawers we used to have in our bedroom and hanging things. So fancy! Like grown ups! With a wardrobe! And shoving all those random Christmas decorations, spare bedding and baby crap up in the top cupboard. Ohhhh yes.

Still so much tweeking to do for the great Brindabella Bedroom Blitz – next up is our new bed with upholstered bedhead, lamps, light fitting, bedside tables, curtains, bedding… Episode #3 could be an evolving story but I will try my utmost not to keep you waiting quite so long again!

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* Delightful as in, I hate it and think it’s as ugly as sin!