The Bedroom

And by magic I do of course mean the five nights a month where I manage to sleep all the way through without waking up randomly at 3AM (why is it always three AM?! Answers on postcards and pigeons below, please.)

The last time I posted about the bedroom I described the look I was aiming for as 'Scandi-Boho', or Sunday Morning in room form. The latter description was stolen influenced by one of the many podcasts I listen to (though one of the few not true crime related), Carrie On, which is an episode-by-episode analysis and commentary podcast of Sex and The City, because I'm an English lit graduate at heart who loves me some 90's TV and in-depth analysis of basically any media that I intake is my jam. But I digress. My point is, at some point in the Carrie On podcasts the hosts describe one of the relationships (I want to say Carrie and Aiden, but don't quote me on it...) as being shot as if it's always ten o'clock on a Sunday morning. You know that feeling - there's still enough day left that you don't have the pre-Monday jitters yet, you're still all blissed out from sleep and the fact that yesterday was Saturday - it's just the perfect time of the week. And when the sun is streaming across your sheets and you're having a hot drink and breakfast in bed (made by someone else, if at all possible), it's about as close to heaven as we mere mortals can get. Add a good book and some massive chunky bed socks and I could die happily right there and then.

I also explained in my previous bedroom post that one way I was aiming to achieve this blissful state of calmness in the room was by making it a place only for sleep - all of our clothes etc. live elsewhere, in the smaller back bedroom also known as my our dressing room. If you also have the absolute luxury of this option, I cannot recommend it highly enough - not least because it is incredibly relaxing to be able to close the door on the small pile of 'is this washing?' clothes at night and not have to sort through them until it's absolutely necessary the next morning.

However, I did encounter somewhat of a downside to this idea when we actually started to put the room together - namely, that we ended up with the least amount of furniture in the biggest room of the house. Combine that with our soft while walls and the minimal decor in there, and for months, we ended up with a room that felt weirdly incomplete - a bit like sleeping in a half-finished art gallery. 

I tried a few different things to rectify the situation. We need some storage in there (we keep our pyjamas in the bedroom because obviously), so I tried putting our linen cupboard (which until recently was the child-sized wardrobe that had been in my bedroom at home and was originally bought for my nursery) against one wall, à la lovedbysheila, but it just looked lost. I tried creating a reading corner with my upcyled Ikea poäng chair, but it was too dark and the colours and materials didn't really mesh. Basically, it was just... meh.

I moved the cupboard downstairs to the dining room (which makes a lot more sense for it, since it mainly holds towels and our bathroom is also downstairs) and the poäng, with accompanying footstool, to be a second seat in the sun room (which also makes a lot more sense, since it actually goes in there plus the footstool can be a third seat, so all of us - myself, A and the dog can sit in there and chat, which is actually quite lovely), and went back to the drawing board.

And then a few things happened in quick-ish succession:

First, my younger sister moved back to our parents house after finishing uni and decided that, with the addition of three years of acquired things added to the previous ten years of stuff already in the room, she no longer had the space for the old papasan chair she had in there. Now, I had always been a touch envious of that chair - I mean, it's basically a nest for humans - so when my family asked if we had room for it, obviously I snapped it up for the reading corner in the bedroom.

It works so much better than the other chair did - I think partly because it's just bigger, both in width and height, so it has a lot more presence, but also because the wood is light - it's actually made of bamboo, I think, though not sure if you can tell very well from the pictures - so it just works better in the overall scheme, too. I love curling up in this chair by the window when the sun is shining and it's all warm and cosy, but I don't often get much of a chance, because Brokk has also discovered this little slice of loveliness and claimed it for his own:

Secondly, I saw this image on Pinterest and decided that I needed a green throw and cushions, stat. Sadly I didn't have the funds for the gorgeous green velvet bedspread in the picture, but I found some fairly good alternatives from H&M Home for about a tenth of the price. 

The final thing that happened I can't really explain, other than that one day just after I'd had some bad news I had a sudden burst of I-need-to-do-something-or-my-brain-will-implode energy and two hours later the bedroom looked ten times better than it had that morning. Somehow, until then I hadn't noticed that I had a very strong green theme emerging - from the new blanket to the plants everywhere to the wall art - and only once I'd shifted everything around a little did it all just click into place.

Interior magic!

Take a look:

And there we have it! After a lot of unnecessary buildup, my bedroom in all of its glory!

I find it weirdly hard to finish posts off, so I'm just going to leave you by saying that I hope you have a great week, and