The Interior DIYer
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Spare bedroom spruce up + room tour

We don’t own our apartment, we rent it. I feel I need to write this every so often as a reminder that I don’t have complete control over the design of our place. I have to work with what came with our apartment as best as I can. Don’t get me wrong, the bones of our apartment are good, but for the most part it’s restrictive. Especially when you have a blog that’s all about design and DIY. Trust me, if we owned this place, it would be wearing a velvet cape and lasers would be shooting out of its eyes. 

Anyways! In recent months, I’ve gotten a bit ballsier. We live here. I have projects I’d like to do in our apartment and stuff I want to hang up, so I’m going to go ahead and do that. Well, really uninvasive projects. I’m not ballsy enough to start knocking down walls. 

One such project I had in mind was to create a repurposed bedside light for our spare bedroom. As the bedside table is so small, I wanted a light that wasn’t taking up valuable table top real estate. Maybe I could hang a light from the ceiling … of course! What’s even better, I managed to make it out of a recycled vacuum cord. Boom.

And I have to say I’m de-lighted with how it turned out [sorry / not sorry]. A streak of exposed industrial style lighting to offset as well as compliment the calming pink accents. And of course, I have a tutorial lined up next week for how you can DIY your very own recycled light!

UPDATE – see my vacuum cord pendant light tutorial here! 

Regarding the rest of the room, below is a little panoramic tour as I realised I’ve never shown anything other than one corner of the room. And I do mean a little tour as it’s a small room … 

I attempted to add a gallery to one of the walls. We’ve lived in our apartment for five years now and we have a scarce amount of pictures and artwork hung up, so I’m practicing in here. I hung the most calming and peaceful pieces in the spare bedroom; some of the weirder and darker stuff I’ve kept for the rest of our apartment as the last thing I’d want is a guest to be weirded out by something we have hanging on the wall.

This wall is also a work in progress – anything leftover from updating our bedroom will be hung up here and added at a later date. 

The narrow white shelving unit above houses our DVD collection. It’s not very wide so it doesn’t get in the way of the bedroom door.

My first attempt at yarn art is up! Again, I kept the yarn colours calm and neutral. If this were anywhere else in our apartment it would probably have black or red yarn. But, guests. It’s not good if your guests want to hide. This is another work in progress as I might add more yarn.
Another small update I made was to the window. I added a longer curtain rod to extend the curtains all the way to the walls. It makes the room look a bit more finished as well as covers the unsightly vent. And it looks all hotel curtainy. I love hotel curtains! 

I showed husband the completed room yesterday evening. He looked around for a good while and finally said, “I’m actually jealous this isn’t our room” and walked out. Seal of approval I’d say! I can’t wait to work on our bedroom and get some artwork and a bit of attitude up. 

And to anyone that’s stayed in our spare bedroom up until now, I’m sorry. You are more than welcome to come back now that it’s a proper room with a bit of character! Give give me a couple hours notice to buy in some breakfast. xx 

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Master bedroom makeover update – Part II

Since I last blogged about upgrading our bedroom, I’ve slowly but surely made some of the changes. Not all of them yet, but some. I didn’t think I had made a big enough change until I looked back at my before pictures. Yeesh.

That’s the thing about updating your home. It doesn’t happen in 24 hours like TV shows lead you to believe. It happens slowly over weeks and sometimes months and THAT’S OKAY. It’s only when you look back at what it looked like before that all your hard work is put into perspective. Even if you’re only half way there. 

Contrary to my original plans to completely flip the floorplan of the room, I didn’t. I was able to iron out a lot of the layout problems without having to change too much of the room. One of the biggest and best changes I made was swapping the bed frame in our room with the one in the spare bedroom. The frame in the spare bedroom was very low, so swapping it and having a low bed in our bedroom sorted issue #3 on the list of problems. 

So here’s what I’ve updated in our room so far …

– Repainted the skirting boards, window sill and door WHITE. 
– Removed the heater from the middle of the room.
– Replaced the heater switch with a socket so we can use our TV [thank you again Maria for that tip!].
– Replaced the light fixture.
– Bought curtains – nearly new! In their original packaging, but bought second hand.
– Bought a longer curtain rod so the curtains can hide the unsightly mirrors and vent in the corner [as seen below compared to the 4th last picture here].
– Disassembled the awkward AF shelves.
– Sold our IKEA bedside locker and bought two bedside lockers for 9 euro each, second hand!
– Got my hands on some red rasta pillows [not sure about the purple one though. It may go]. 
– Swapped the bed frame for the lower bed frame, and nearly decapitated myself in the process.

And here’s what’s left to do … 
– Make a cover to cover or camouflage the current wooden headboard.  
– Hang up / incorporate our [new-ish] mahogany mirror. 
– Add artwork to the walls. I’m tired of boring walls. I’ll be DIYing some artwork too.
– Upcycle the bedside tables; possibly paint them and change the knobs.
– Find a pair of matching or semi-matching bedside lamps.

Above is to show where Dad DIYer helped me remove the heater from the wall [I’m not at all confident with electrics]. Having the heater removed means we can now place our dresser in the middle of the room at the foot of our bed; where it aught to be. For the moment, in the warmer months, the heater is stored under our bed as our landlord didn’t approve of it being placed under the window. So under the bed with it for now so we don’t have to put up with it. My old skip-salvaged desk chair sits next to our dresser and cleverly disguises the absence of paint on the wall. 

And finally, what inspired it all – I saw these red velvet shoes in Forever 21 around this time last year. I bought them solely for their pretty factor. I like velvet and I like quirky takes on the classics, which as lame as it sounds, is an inspiration for our bedroom makeover. Inspiration strikes at the most unusual of moments. 
In the mean time, I’ve also been working on updating our spare bedroom on a budget, which for the most part was ready for our guests earlier this month, but I’ll be adding the final touches this week to it and can’t wait to share it! Stay tuned! 

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Home Improvements

I’ve had a variety of projects going on over the past few weeks, all of which are / will be finishing up shortly. Some have been minor yet long overdue [and sometimes giant] updates to our apartment. Nothing particularly exciting as they’re mostly paint related. 
I repainted all the skirting boards and doors in our apartment, and this morning at 04:00 I repainted our hallway [husband had to be in work really early, so I was awake and figured I’d strike while the iron was hot]. All the boring painting jobs have needed to be done for 4+ years now, so while it’s not a big change to the actual design, to us it’s a huge difference. Even husband commented last night “it feels like we just moved in again!” In a good way. 

This week in particular I have the perfect excuse to spruce up our spare bedroom a little bit as we’ll have 2 very important guests. But first, I need to change the battery in that tiny clock. It ran out before I met husband … Nine years ago. It’s been stuck at 07:13:43 for long enough.
I picked up some second hand furniture and fittings for our master bedroom makeover, hemmed a pair of giant curtains, removed the awkward radiator from the middle of our bedroom wall, and souped up our chest of drawers to house our TV accessories [the latter two were completed by Dad DIYer]. I’ve also started rearranging and hanging more artwork in our apartment, which is something I’m terrible at doing. I have about 50 picture frames, all of which are in a cupboard gathering dust. 

I’ve also had a chance to sit down and do some small projects I’ve had in mind for a long time. I sewed a cute bauble trim onto our bathmat [as seen in the first picture] and I’m in the process of cross stitching a cheeky number for the bathroom. It’s a bit risque, which is fine in person, but I’m not sure about how well it would translate online. We’ll see. I might share it as it’s a bit of fun. 

It’s another cracking day here in Dublin so when you’re finished a day of work, you feel like there’s still time to go out and enjoy yourself. I’ll be trying my hand at foraging later this evening. Hopefully I pick the right stuff! xx A