Interior Design for Beginners

You see, when Little Miss Madam was on her way, husband and I started to replan our current living situation. The plan is to someday buy/build our own house, with enough room for everyone and maybe even a small sewing/crafting room for me - if the garage is large enough for husband to get along with his woodwork there, that is ;-)

However, we like - no we love! - living in this neighbourhood, and last year nothing was out for sale. So we decided to stay here at least for the first two couple of years and redesign how we use our flat instead of replanning the living situation as a whole.

The major change took place in our bedroom. We completely refurnished this room in order to be able to make 2 smaller rooms out of one and not lose any storage space but increase if possible. I am especially happy about the colours I picked for the walls. I was brave and decided to opt for a strong purple colour and sand for the other walls to balance it out. Little Miss Madam's area is in one of the 'sandy' parts, as I did not want the baby corner to be too dark.

Well, anyway, as we were expecting a baby-surprise, I opted for unisex draperies for the baby basket (http://nessies-time-fillers.blogspot.de/2012/07/finally.html). After the surpise turned out to be Little Miss Madam, that eased the possibilities of decorating the baby corner immensely (no, I'm not really into decorating for boys in purple) and I started having the wildest ideas. But until now, they were only really ideas. Last month, however, we noticed that she would not fit into the baby basket for long and started the project Baby Bed, which involved more than just one family member:

My sister-in-law had a baby bed to give away, basically in good condition but in desperate need of new varnish. So I thought, if the job has to be done anyway and we spent all that time renovating our bedroom, go for the whole sweep and varnish the bed to blend in nicely with the rest of our room's concept. My father-in-law offered to sand down the bed for us beforehand, so I did not have that much ado with it before letting the brushes fly. Meanwhile I went to the hardware store and let them mix a varnish colour that almost matches our purple walls and took a tin of white back home as well (our furniture has white doors, we have a white 'room divider', ...). Then my father-in-law phoned and said, he would be very happy to varnish the bed for us, if we brought the varnish to him and said what colours had to go where. So, with father-in-law occupied for the next few days, I browsed the internet for a few butterfly wall stickers, as I imagined them to be quite sweet as the last finishing touch for the bed. Yesterday the big day had come for Little Miss Madam: the baby basket was taken out and the baby bed was put up. Today we decided on a place for the wall stickers. I am really happy with this. Sure, it's not a typical baby bed but it fits in great into the rest of the room and last night Little Miss Madam slept really well.

And what I have also been longing for for quite some time now is a switch light near her bed. We took off for the lamp today and found a basic white glass shade wall lamp. It looked quite boring, to be honest, but all the others were too fancy or in colours that messed up the whole look of the room. And it also did not look really child-friendy (I mean from the design point of view).

This evening I thought I'd just try to make it a bit more interesting and found a sheet of purple tracing paper. I cut out two butterfly shapes and stuck them from the outside onto the shade. At first I wasn't too sure about the result but then husband tried it out and I am positively surprised with how good it looks! This is an idea that I mustn't forget when we do eventually buy our own home!