Our dark bedroom

I’ve been waiting to show pictures of our bedroom until it was finished, but I’ve learned that a room is never really finished, and at the moment I have it looking as close to finished as a bedroom in a rented apartment can get. 
Do you remember last year when I picked paint for Cora’s nursery? Fleetwood Paints very generously offered for me to choose two tins of paint from their new range to add to our home. Along with picking Pantone’s Lunar Rock for Cora’s room, I selected a tin of their Vogue range’s very moody and deep 1830 Rue Chapal for our bedroom. Our room gets a very poor amount of natural light, so I figured painting our room even darker would add to it. It was a big step for me painting an entire room such a dark shade, but it was the best nesting-fuelled choice I made. 

Fleetwood’s Vogue paint, much like their Pantone line, has to be one of the best paints I’ve used to date. It took two coats to paint our room and still had loads left over for touch ups. Speaking of, one deal breaker for me that separates low quality and high quality paint is the touch-up test; if you touch up a patch of wall and it’s so obvious that it looks like you might as well have painted red arrows towards the now seething blotch, that’s how I can tell a paint is truly a good quality or not. With both Fleetwood’s Pantone and Vogue range you couldn’t tell where I had made touch ups the following day. For me, that’s a deal breaker because I will go out of my way and repaint a wall just to avoid a haggard touch up blotch. But it wasn’t necessary [TG] with this paint. 

I painted our room in 1830 Rue Chapal the night before I was due to be induced [in hindsight, not a great idea], but once we had our new dark room, I thought about a theme I’ve long wanted to design with. 
I’ve had a long fascination with Russian history, its architecture and the [dare I say] dark, romantic, luxe feeling that comes with it [recent news and political stuff aside of course] …

– My best friend and I were fascinated with Russian history when we were in high school.
– I taught myself [basic conversation] Russian 13 years ago and the first conversation Robert and I had when we first met was me teaching him how to say hello in Russian – здравствуйте [zdra-stvooee-tyay]
– The happy coincidence behind the Russian watercolour my mom bought me. 
– At our wedding I found out from my grandmother’s sister that my grandmother always had a fascination with Russia and always wanted to go. Something I never knew. It particularly blew my mind as we were going to Russia for our honeymoon a few days after our wedding [we visited again two years later].
– My dad’s first name is Russian and so is mine [Alexandra]. My grandmother’s fascination with Russia may have had a part in my dad’s name [and maybe mine?], but that’s just a guess. 

I took my theme and adding a few things from our travels. I printed one of my favourite photos I took when we were on our honeymoon in St. Petersburg as well as a photo I took of our Karlsson flip clock of the time and date of Cora’s birth, and framed them side by side. The frames I used are a now discontinued frame from IKEA which I love the look of, but there was plastic in the frame in stead of glass, which never sat flat in the frame and always looked warped, so I took out the protective pieces of plastic. It made for better photo taking too. 

I also framed a letter I sent home to Robert while he was in the shower one morning on our honeymoon. I sent it along with all our thank you cards after the wedding из России с любовью – from Russia with love. A very small detail, but something so many people bring up when they see us. James Bond or wha. 
It’s illegal to take Russian currency outside of Russia, but I was able to sneak two metro tokens home in my change purse. One of which I’ve stuck up on our wall with blu tac. 

Our room doesn’t look truly finished and it’s not perfect nor does it have essential flower arrangements to top it off, but this is what it looks like for now. For anyone out there thinking about going dark with their bedroom, I would say don’t walk but run to your nearest paint store. Come over to the dark side.

Master bedroom makeover Part IPart IIPart III – Reveal[?]

Also featured – pink dresser updatefaux marble bedside tablesour engagement storylove dove lampsmall watercolour

DISCLOSURE – while this blog post is not sponsored, I did receive this paint free of charge from Fleetwood via MRCB. I only work with brands and companies that I like and of course, think you will too. Thank you for supporting the companies that support The Interior DIYer. 

#DublinDesignNight 2016

Last Wednesday night saw Dublin’s second annual #DublinDesignNight as organised by Yelp and Image Interiors & Living make its way across the city centre. I was pretty excited as it was my first ‘night out’ since having Cora, so while I unfortunately didn’t get to visit every venue on the map, I tried my best to get to a good few places before hobbling to the bus [it can be tough to walk and stand for long periods of time after having a baby. Who knew?].

I first visited Designist, where everyone was greeted with a hot chocolate not-so-secretly-spiked with rum. If this is something you haven’t heard of or tried before, TRY IT. I may just be my new favourite hot winter drink. 

I picked up another of The Handmade Soap Company‘s candles. I bought their grapefruit and may chang candle a few months ago and loved it, so this time I picked up one of their sweet orange, basil and frankincense candles. I also picked up an adorable frog patterned Bandana Bib by Little Green Dot for little Cora [which I have yet to use because it’s far too cute]. 
From there, I quickly visited Appassionata, Irish Design Shop and Industry. All of which were packed so I didn’t stay long. I made one last stop at Article before heading home. I’ve had my eye on their swan mobile for a long time and these days I find that if I don’t get something I really like when I first see it, it’ll be gone the next time I check. So I grabbed one [seen below yet to be assembled] and think it’ll be perfect over Cora’s changing table / dresser to keep her entertained and slightly less wriggly. I also saw one of those old-school clip in letter board signs, but as it was a little more expensive, it would more so be a mini investment. Which usually means I think about it non-stop for a week then end up taking a trip into town especially to get it. We’ll see 😉

You can read my post on last year’s and first #DublinDesignNight here!

Nursery plans – part 2

I’ve managed to somehow not accidentally spill the beans on the gender of little bebe-to-be. Yet! Seeing as I’m sharing some design ideas today, spoiler alert: we’re expecting a little girl! We were completely surprised when we found out as I was utterly convinced it was a boy [shoddy early mother instinct]. I wanted to avoid obvious choices for the nursery like pink and flowers etc. Maybe because I was convinced for so long it was a boy? This was one of the reasons I fell into a bit of a rutt … 

There are two reasons we hadn’t started the nursery until this week. For some reason [hormones], I had it in my mind that all the unfinished projects in our apartment had to be resolved before I could start the nursery. I made an 8-page list of things I had to do before we could begin. This ranged from cleaning the oven, painting the immersion, recaulking the bathroom, painting the ceilings and everything in between.

The second thing stopping me was the design of the nursery itself. I don’t know how or why [hormones], but I was under the impression [again, hormones] that the nursery had to be wildly different from the rest of our home; a different colour scheme, style and be gender neutral. I don’t know why. Did I mentioned hormones?

Luckily, over the past week I shook myself out of both mindsets. I realised I just want a cute and fun nursery [groundbreaking, I know]. We’re having a girl. Yes, I like burgundy. And pink. This isn’t new. I also like green but I’m not going to reinvent the wheel with our nursery by trying to make it something wildly different to what we already like. I’m hoping to make it fun and cute without it screaming ‘A LITTLE GIRL LIVES HERE ZOMG CAN YOU TELL THROUGH ALL THE HOT NEON PINK?‘. A little bit fun and a little bit Grand Budapest Hotel with gothic accents.

Less typing, more visualising! Onto the design we’re hoping for …

– A lot of the artwork for the nursery will be from what we already have [Bill Murray print, cardboard monogram etc.], will be second hand or from independent artists as much as possible.
– As for wall colour, I’m aiming for a subtle and cheery light grey paint. Fleetwood Paint sent me a gift voucher a few months ago and I’ll be excitedly picking up some tester paints this week. Yeah, grey is a safe shade. I decided on it because it goes with every colour [and I’m hoping to have a bit more colour in the nursery than the rest of our apartment], but also when we eventually move out, a subtle grey paint won’t need to be painted over compared to the living room and our bedroom. Forward thinking.
– Going with my mostly second hand theme, we picked up a standard pine dresser a few months ago for next to nothing on Adverts. I’m hoping to repaint it white at the very least; maybe something a bit more fun. We have yet to find an armchair to re-cover, but im hoping to find one soon. SOON.
– I’m also just hoping to put a lot of fun and cute things in here; hopefully appealing to both babies and adults alike. Some amigurumi creatures, alternative pieces and a handfull of cheeky things that’ll surely make our nursery a lot less worthy of appearing in a magazine [ahem, poo pillow and my ‘Even Katy Perry Poops‘ cross stitch #KeepingItReal].

I don’t have an entirely set design in mind so we’re mostly going to see what we find and do a bit of winging it. But the above are the basics and I’m hoping to build on it as we go. It’s exciting now that we’re about to start, but we better hurry up as we have T minus 9 weeks … ZOMG 🙂