Rubi recently asked if there was any way she could have more space. We live in a 3-bedroom house and divided the biggest room into two smaller rooms by a dividing wall to give her and Ellia a little room each. It’s been up for about a year but wasn’t meant to be a long-term solution.
I’d been toying with the idea of making the dining room into a room and either me and Troy going in it or one of the girls. This has been the bunny room for the last 2 years, so we have been trying to figure out where the bunnies could go, that gave them their space too. We keep Emi separate due to her biting.
So, we sat down with Rubi and discussed her potentially having the dining room as her room but having Emi in with her. She jumped at the chance. She got straight to designing her room. We told her it would only work if Ellia agreed to go into the new room upstairs. So, we spoke to Ellia who again jumped at the chance to have her own room.
We discussed it and decided the best time to do all of this would be when me and Troy had annual leave between Christmas and New Year. This would give us enough time to get all of the paint and flooring bit by bit. Deal! We measured the rooms for flooring just so we knew how much we would need.
We thought we would go and look at the DIY store to get ideas for paint colours and flooring. We headed off to Wickes. Off to the paint aisle to find the colour for Rubi’s room. She found the colour she liked (210 Steel). They had it on offer for £10 per tub, we grabbed 2. We went over to look at the flooring as we had all decided on grey laminate. We took a few pictures as we wanted to know which one Ellia wanted to. Off to the till to get this paint.
As we were walking over there was a reduced trolley just to the left, it looked like it had packs of laminate, 5 packs, the exact amount needed for Rubis room…. There was no price, so Troy asked the shop assistant how much it was. £33.96 per pack but hold on… she spoke into her headset… its reduced to £10 per pack. In the words of Harry Potter ‘we’ll take the lot’. We couldn’t believe our luck.
We got home and started emptying the dining room straight away. Our poor bunnies were turfed out of there room as we began stripping away the wallpaper (they enjoyed jumping through this though) and getting the walls prepped for painting.
It took us a grand total of 2 days to prep, paint and floor the whole room (even if the laminate was a nightmare to put down, no wonder it was reduced). But we needed all the necessary accessories to kit out the room too. So on to Facebook marketplace we went. She found some beautiful shelves that had the coat hooks below for £10 and a nice desk for free (It was a John Lewis desk too, although this has now been replaced by the vanity unit from her Nana). We also went to Dunelm to look for curtains and rugs. She found the curtains she wanted in the sale for £7.50 and they were thermal lined. Her room was all coming together nicely. We got the shelves and desk in and then Nanna Kez kindly donated a wardrobe she didn’t need and that was it, Rubi was in her new room.
Next, we took Ellia to get her paint for her room, she decided she wanted pink. After going to B&Q, B&M and Wickes, she decided on 605 Poetic pink. Whilst browsing through B&M we noticed one of their grey laminates was reduced to half price. There was 2.2sqm per pack for £13.32. We quickly calculated how many packs were needed for Ellia’s and our room and got them along with the underlay for less than £200, what a bargain. So we got it.
We started her room by painting the walls the colours she wanted, we used the remainder of the grey from Rubi’s room and the new pink she had picked and had the painting done in a few short hours. We then had to remove the wall from the middle of the other room to move our stuff out, so we could take the floor up to put the floor down…. Again, nightmare flooring it doesn’t click in until the next piece is under it or something like that… I left Troy to it! We quickly realised we had used more laminate on Ellia’s room than we thought, and Troy had to mad dash to B&M to get another pack just in case we didn’t have enough for our room.
We decided to give Ellia our drawer set and wardrobe as it fit with her room, and we weren’t going to need it with the plans we had. We then decided to give her our desk too as it was easier than moving it… So that was Ellia all set. She has so much stuff…. She decided to do a big clear out of her things. She got a pair of bargain curtains off marketplace (think we paid £5), and they look amazing in her room. We still have a few finishing touches. But within 7 days we had created 2 new bedrooms and about to embark on our third.
Our room…. The most difficult. First things first…. DEMOLTION. We needed to remove the cupboards that were the girls built in wardrobes. This could have been problematic as the original chimney breast runs through their room. Luckily, it was already blocked off. We knew it was going to be a really big task and even bigger cost as we would need to create a wardrobe. I drew up a plan of how I’d like it to look and showed troy who agreed. Browsing through Facebook and it pops up… that someone is giving away sliding wardrobe doors for a built-in wardrobe… for FREE. I sent them to Troy to make sure they would work, and he messaged to ask if we could have them… we could… off to Leamington. It was about 40 minutes’ drive but so worth it. They were exactly what we needed. I really could not believe the luck we were having.
We decided we wanted storage above and in the middle of the wardrobe with a rail either side and a hidden shoe compartment. Again, we managed to find a Kallax unit free to collector that we could adapt into what we wanted. It also came with 2 draw inserts and a cupboard insert. Brilliant. Troy went and collected it. He said it was just a little bit too small for where the top shelf was going to be, so we needed another 1 x 2 box unit to sit on top of it. We planned on going to IKEA to get one, but again looked on Marketplace and there it was, exactly what we were looking for! Only problem being it was in Northampton… about 55 minutes away. Oh, but hold on…. Rubi goes training on Wednesday in Rugby…. 15 minutes from Northampton. Troy messaged the person selling it, he seemed perplexed that we would travel all the way over from Redditch for a £10 unit, he even offered to meet us in Daventry until Troy explained Rubi went to Rugby for training. So, we arranged to collect on the Wednesday night. Result! It took me on a half hour round trip to collect.
Now the hard work begins. We needed to construct the wardrobe, remove all the wallpaper and paint. We stripped the small amount of wallpaper on the window wall, filled all the holes and prepped for painting. We decided on a small picture rail around the top that would separate the two paint colours. Cream on top and green below, we were thinking woodland theme. We boarded the walls of the wardrobe with some 3mm hardwood we got from Build land. Once that was done, we painted the inside the same colour cream as the tops of our walls. We’re now ready for our paint. We decided on Edenberry and Ottawa from B&Q as they currently had the 3 for 2 offers on their paints.
We had some spare MDF from a previous project that we managed to use to construct the hidden shoe boxes at the base and the shelf above the unit. My lovely Mama gave me some black furniture paint to match it with the Kallax unit. Once painted, we attached the clothes rails either side and my whole vision came to life.
In the midst of all this we managed to get ourselves a king size ottoman bed. We upgraded and asked Rubi if she wanted our double ottoman bed, which she said most definitely. Sold! We gave Rubi’s bed to my mom to have in her spare room as it has the lift upside to store things underneath. This meant we had to go get Rubi new bedding. She picked a really nice duvet cover from Asda’s George home range and 13.5 tog quilt with extra pillows. (This happened the night she had football training and Troy very kindly moved her new bed downstairs and assembled it for her for when she finished).
We didn’t have any curtains or a rail for our room, we wanted to get as close match as we could to the colours we had chosen. The range had some beautiful cream and green ones; they also had a curtain pole with stags as the end stoppers. Absolute bargain for both as the curtains were meant to be £40 and the rail was meant to be £25; we paid £24 for both.
We managed to get our flooring down 11/11 and realised the mad dash to get another pack was completely unnecessary as we have 2 packs left, so Layton gets new flooring too now. We painted the skirting boards and added them.
We decided we wanted to display our Disney traditions in our room, but didn’t have a unit big enough to do this. On to Facebook marketplace again. There was a lovely couple getting rid of their floor to ceiling bookshelves. Two trips later and we had a complete wall filled with shelving ready to be loaded.
One half is filled with books, the rest me and Ellia filled with all our Disney Tradition ornaments. The room looked amazing. We managed to get all this done in a 2-week window. We then managed to put our Christmas tree up and it looked MAGICAL.
Layton decided he wanted carpet for his room, so we got that for him and built him a new bed from Kallax units.
So what started as a project for the week between Christmas and New Year, managed to be completed before the start of December.