Just after Christmas my eldest son became a teenager and so we wanted to makeover his bedroom to give it a more grown up feel. It was very plain and boring with beige carpet and white walls; it actually hadn’t been redecorated since the room was used as a nursery for his younger brothers – and they are now 6 and 9 – so a change was well overdue.
Although the smallest bedroom in the house, I really wanted to try and give it the feel of a mini urban loft apartment. Key to this soft-industrial look is brick, wood and metal, so when I was offered the chance to review some wallpaper from I Want Wallpaper.co.uk I was delighted to discover that they had several brick styles available.
I chose the Muriva Just Like It Loft Brick Wallpaper and was really excited when it arrived. It has a great, raised and textured finish for an authentic look and feel.
It is a really nice quality paper that should be very durable. Even though we’re not very experienced at wallpapering, it went up easily and quickly and a roll is really good value. Rather than wallpaper the whole of our small bedroom with the brick effect paper, which might have looked a bit too much, we opted to put it on two walls only. On the other walls I was keen to add a rich, deep paint colour that would complement the brick and metallic accessories. First thoughts had been a smoky dark blue-grey, but when I saw the intense, matt colour ‘Genuine’ which is verging towards a blue-green, from Crown’s Fashion for Walls range, I knew that was the one!
xIt has a great depth of colour and covered really well – only one coat needed on the white waffle wallpaper that we were covering, which was impressive as I thought two coats would be needed.
Recently I’d been invited to do a crafty DIY tutorial on the Wayfair blog and as we were planning Alex’s bedroom makeover at the time, I opted to personalise some Wayfair crates to stack in his room like a shelving unit.
I really like the rustic feel they give to the space and they’ve also added some valuable storage to his room. Wayfair also kindly gifted me a wire basket from Gallery which I’ve hung on the back of his door and an Ampersand wall sign which really is the finishing touch with its lovely industrial metal finish.
Alex’s Nana bought him a couple of New York themed duvet covers that fit the scheme perfectly; this NYC Manhattan Skyline one from Asda and another from Argos called the New York Reflections Bedding Set
He doesn’t have room for much furniture; he just has a bookcase, desk and chair in addition to his bed (and some underbed storage boxes), but there isn’t space for a wardrobe so he uses a pretty boring white Ikea hanging rail for anything that needs hanging up, e.g. his school uniform. I like the simplicity of the rail and it does the job, so I just bought a can of copper spray paint from B & Q and used it to give the hanging rail a cooler look.
The only thing left to do in the room is paint the floorboards, which we are planning to do grey, so I’ll share that project when we tackle it!
What do you think of the room and especially the wallpaper? Did we meet the brief do you think?
