James’ new bedroom

News alert: James’ bedroom is complete! I think it was roughly 3 months ago that I first shared with you all the need to split the boys up and give James his own room. Shamefully it has taken me this long to transform our guest room into a bedroom fit for our little boy.

The biggest challenge I had with this room was making it dual purpose; a bedroom for James and an occasional guest room. We needed to keep the double bed and two side tables with lamps and make it ‘guest friendly’ whilst retaining its primary function as James’ bedroom. Deep down I knew James would have loved Spiderman or Batman all over his walls but that just wasn’t going to work when guests are here to stay! I had to find a balance between creating a bedroom that is fun, friendly and fit for a 7 year old boy, yet comfortable and practical for when guests come to stay.

As with any project of mine, it all began on Pinterest. I started by entering ‘buzz words’ that were closely linked to how I wanted the room to look – for example; ‘cool boys room’, ‘red and blue boys room’ etc. I then trawled through the search results and on pins I liked, clicked them and then scrolled down to discover more similar pins. I saved all the pins I liked and created a concept board. This is the one I created for James’ room:

I then pulled together my own mood board using Illustrator on my MacBook and sourced all the items that I thought would work cohesively together.

From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to remove the existing curtains and curtain poles and replace them with red striped blinds. I opted for blackout roman blinds made by the Natural Curtain Company in the fabric Candy Apple.

Some of you may remember a string of Instagram stories of me getting in a right pickle with an IKEA bed(?!). For those who don’t, I’ll explain…. The bed we already have is an old Hemnes bed with an IKEA mattress. This bed doesn’t have any room for under bed storage which is something I really wanted for James’ room (FYI the new Hemnes beds do). Given I already had an IKEA mattress and remembered that IKEA mattresses are different in size to standard mattresses, I went off to buy a new IKEA bed frame. However, little did I know that since we first bought the mattress from IKEA (which was roughly 11 years ago), IKEA now sells standard mattress sizes and only stock a few bed frames in the old IKEA sizes!

Needless to say, I ended up buying the wrong sized frame for my mattress and Matt ended up dismantling and rebuilding 2 beds… twice! It didn’t go down very well (grumpy husband..!!).

In the end, I decided to keep our existing bed – after all, I quite liked the frame and I simply couldn’t justify spending over £300 for the same frame but with the addition of under bed storage. I could buy a nice stand-alone chest for that.

With the beds and blinds sorted, I moved on to bed furnishings and room accessories. My theme for the room centered around animals after seeing some gorgeous animal prints from Desenio, some yellow giraffe printed cushions at Sainsbury’s and some very cool animal wall heads from Interiors of Essex. James loves animals so I gave him the chance of choosing which ones he wanted and he decided on giraffes and whales.

I’m not one to completely stick to a theme so I went slightly off-piste and ended up throwing in some sharks on a washing basket from TK Maxx and on a magnetic noticeboard from Not on the Highstreet. I also found a gorgeous bed set and coordinating cover from Christy which tied in so well with my colour scheme of navy blue and yellow. I simply fell in love with their new Cosmos and Galaxy collection which is space themed!

To bring a little more colour to the room, I introduced a red and blue star cushion from John Lewis, some gorgeous storage suitcases from Sass and Belle and a yellow star wall light from Not on the Highstreet.

And so, here is James’ finished room…

Lastly, the colour on the walls is Cornforth White from Farrow and Ball, the rug is from House of Fraser, the wired magazine rack is from eBay, the illuminated globe light is from John Lewis and the hammerhead shark is from ZSL.

Hope you liked the makeover and enjoyed the post!

Thanks for reading x