Renovation Recap: Our Primary Bedroom Makeover

For the past 188 days, Ed and I have been camping out in our loft on an old Ikea mattress without bedding. Why no bedding, you might ask? Well, we initially didn’t think bedsheets were worth the bother as we **wouldn’t be up there for very long**. Then, after several months, we became committed to the bit… a renovation is the perfect opportunity to live like feral creatures without judgment.

Up until this past week, our primary bedroom was packed to the rafters with boxes and furniture. Now that we’re on the verge of completing our other rooms, we’ve been able to clear out our primary for the fun part - furnishing and styling !!!

So for this week’s recap, here’s a rundown of how we’ve transformed our primary bedroom…

When we first moved in, this bedroom was an unremarkable yellow rectangle, punctuated with some questionable red velour curtains. Everything had to go.

We kicked off the makeover by swapping out the millennial grey carpet, which had decades’ worth of hair, dead skin, and nail clippings embedded into it, for engineered oak flooring. I then decided to endure the punishing ordeal of reinstating traditional cornices, which I’ve complained about before and will complain about again.

Once that was out of the way, it was onto painting. The room gets a lot of natural light thanks to its south-facing aspect, so we decided to paint it a dusty blue as we knew it could handle a cool-toned colour without looking dull. Annoyingly, the yellow walls we’d inherited were old and powdery, so we had to prime the entire room with Zinsser Bullseye 1-2-3 before going in with our blue paint of choice - ‘The Good China’ by Coat.

With all the cosmetic upgrades checked off our list, we then shut the door to our primary bedroom and forgot about it for months - only entering to offload Facebook Marketplace finds that’ll migrate to other rooms in months to come.

From our dusty loft, I continued to hoard bedroom inspo while dreaming of the day I’d sleep in a king-sized bed - with actual bedding. After scouring every corner of Pinterest, I whittled down our primary bedroom moodboard to the following images:

Now, trawling Pinterest is the easy part - I could do it in my sleep. In fact, I probably do trawl Pinterest in my sleep. Execution, on the other hand, can be a minefield. I wanted to incorporate vintage furniture without it looking drab, and layer in folky patterns without it feeling too grandma. Easier said than done.

All of the furniture was thrifted from Marketplace/auction sites or passed down to us from family. This allowed us to work with a very small budget and string together a space that feels homely and eclectic.

In terms of decorative elements, I painted a large artwork early last year, which set the tone for the room's colour scheme. We felt that the perfect place to hang it up was on the chimney breast, where the fireplace used to be - sadly, we had to remove it as it wasn’t structurally sound (we kept all the others though!).

All in all, we’re pretty happy with the way it turned out. It really feels like us, and I personally can’t wait to sleep starfished every night on our new king-size bed.