Bedroom redecoration - complete!

Well, it's certainly taken me long enough!

Next time (which I don't intend to be for a long time - the upheval and inconvenience has been tremendous) I'll book time off work to do it rather than trying to fit it in over the weekends.

Here's my verdict on the experience...

Emptying the room

Basically, at some point the room would have to be completely empty in order to lay a new carpet, so that's what I aimed for. It took an enourmous amount of time to sort then 'box / ebay / scrap' everything (as appropriate) and bring the boxes downstairs into a storage area. What's more, the bottom fell out of one of the over-filled cardboard boxes, dropping the contents all over. Lovely.

Demolishing the old (pink) wardrobe was laborious - it had millions of screws! It was also messy. But very satisfying to see it go. I had some valuable assistance from Martyn with chucking out the remains at the tip before going up some mountains (well, wandering aimlessly across the plains as I recall) - cheers Marts!

Demolishing my white bedside cabinet was enourmous fun, and I loved every second of wrecking that old-style woodchip MDF stuff (the desk I'm typing on now is certainly not pure wood, but it's much more solid and better quality). Wonderful for taking out any agression built up over a week's worth of work etc. Having worked at CAF Furniture Place (now called The Arc, I believe) and done this in the past I knew exactly which points to whack with a hammer so it was a quick job.

I'd have to work around the bed most of the time. Standing it on its side and/or moving it out of the room was a pain in the bum. Standing on it to do parts of the preparation and decorating was not wise - it's mostly wooden frames and the surface for the matress is that thick cardboard stuff - which now bulges down into the storage areas underneath. Oops! It's fine still, as long as you don't sit on the far end (you sink a little), and the far end supports the lesser weight (legs/feet) with no noticable difference. I'll get something a bit stronger one day.

Wallpapering

A lot of preparation is needed for this, as the walls need to be smooth, clean and dry. The walls were painted so no messy wallpaper removal was needed, but preparing a painted surface was enough work!

The paint was in very bad condition in some areas so it needed to be sanded down. At least, that's the laborious and messy approach I took, I'm sure it would've been better to remove it completely in some way but in the end it worked.

Holes (plentiful after removing shelf, wall lamp etc) needed to be filled with Polyfilla, which is easy. The repair then had to be sanded down once dry so that it's flat with the wall - that was messy. I hadn't bothered to put dust sheets down and I'd taken most of the 'stuff' out of the room but what remained in the room (including the carpet which was increasingly committed to being replaced!) suffered. So there's a tip, if you don't enjoy cleaning filler dust off your TV, alarm clock, bed sheets etc then use dust sheets!

The previous coats of paint had left solid droplets and bumps all over the walls so they had to be sanded down too. Then once all (mostly) smooth the whole walls needed to be washed down with sugar soap - some areas of the wall being more difficult to clean than others.

Wallpapering itself isn't really as bad as it looks. As long as you follow the advice of diy.com (B&Q's site) or any decent DIY site there's little that can go wrong. But you must follow some instructions as it's not all obvious (I wouldn't have known to draw a plumb line or fold the wallpaper onto itself or had a decent reference of what tools and brush types are needed). What it does need is plenty of space - for the pasting table, equipment, step ladder etc. So in a tiny room like mine (10ft x 6ft minus airing cupboard) everything needed to be moved out and the bed stood on end just for that.

Pasting and trying not to get it on the other side of the paper is difficult but you develop techniques throughout. Otherwise it's easy enough - mix powder with water to create slop as instructed, stir, use.

Hanging the paper seems difficult for the first strip (especially as you generally start from a corner and I made an inch or so go back around the corner as that's how you're advised to handle them). Having a plumb line drawn on the wall was essential. After slipping and sliding the first strip into something resembling vertical then lining it up exactly, then unfolding and laying down the bottom half, it all just kind of fell into place. As diy.com says, the skill develops with practice and by the time the whole room was done... to say I could wallpaper standing on my head would be a gross exaggeration, but I'm not half bad at it, put it that way.

Trimming is a pain - don't try to do it with one blade. You need to get a few of those knives where you can break segments of the blade off and do so for every trim on every strip - the blade needs to be absolutely razor sharp else by experience they get blunt after each trim and will simply tear the wallpaper and make a mess of it.

Corners can be a swine. Common advice is to make the last strip go around the corner by 1 inch or so (by measuring and cutting it lengthways) and when the walls are as uneven as the ones here you get a 'margin' on the next wall which is wide at one point (e.g. the top) and narrow at another (e.g. the bottom) so it seems odd. But when you overlap it with the first strip of the next wall it seems to sort itself out.

Light switches and electrical sockets are a pain. Follow the advice on the sites and switch the electricity off, loosen the front plates and tuck some excess paper underneath. I tried to manage without doing this and whilst the socket was an ok job, this was after experience of the light switch, which was badly done. Thankfully I worked around this by putting one of those wooden borders around the lightswitch (and got a new lightswitch, more on this later) and now it looks great. Phew!

When pure daylight shines in, it does highlight some areas where bumps weren't sanded down properly. But only if you're staring at it, and only when it's really bright. Otherwise the wallpaper looks pretty good!

Painting

Here's another tip - plan the whole thing including colour schemes ahead of the job. Or more to the point: paint the skirting board, door trim etc before putting the wallpaper up (duh!).

Don't think "does it need it?" - just do it. What I did was I thought "nah, I'll stick with that orangey-yellow paint" then once I got the warm cream-ish colour wallpaper up and started thinking about the new carpet it showed just how much it needed the contrasting colour (blue). It is awfully easy to get paint on the wallpaper, and awfully difficult to remove it (as good as impossible with an oil based paint). I tried plastic 'paint in a straight line' guards, but kept smearing the paint onto the wallpaper when lifting it. I tried masking tape - the paint soaks through the edges and when you pull the tape off it tears bits (or entire strips) of the decorative layer off the wallpaper. The only way to handle this is to do the painting before the wallpapering!

I covered up the mess around the door trim etc by using wallpaper borders, which actually looks quite nice and brings life to the otherwise plain wallpaper I deliberately chose, so all is well.

If you try it, prepare to get paint everywhere - on the carpet, on yourself, etc. Unless you plan to replace the carpet, putting dust sheets down would be wise. Also wear some old clothing you're not bothered about or wear overalls. The edges where the carpet meets with the skirting can be a pain (with the carpet sticking to the paint) but the old carpet easily rolled back at the edges in order to do the paint job properly and not have that problem occur.

Oil-based paint proved to be the most messy stuff ever and made short work of the paint brushes. White spirit is needed by the gallon, it's highly dangerous and it stinks. Hands and fingers prove very difficult to clean. I found myself hating oil-based paint with a passion and abandoned it in favour of water-based (which is pretty good nowadays) before I'd painted so much as an eighth of the door frame. This is much less messy and warm soapy water soon cleans up your hands and other equipment. Accidental splashes are easier to clean, too. The downside is it's sortof peelable and doesn't seem as permanent, but only really if you actually... well... try to peel it, or knock it with something (I did this a few times, it's just a matter of touching it up again).

I hate painting after that, but I guess with experience it could be okay. Just do it at the right time!

Ceiling tiles

Messy as hell to remove. Yourself and the entire room and all its contents get coated in little bits of polystyriene (spelling?) if that's what they're made of like mine were. What's more they get static charges very easily so bits of it will happily stick to the wall. It's difficult to throw little bits of polystyriene away because the static makes them stick to your fingers like a magnet!

The old adhesive, which seems to end up like a dry powder, also makes a mess.

Prepare to grunt and sweat a lot as you hack away with something like a filling knife or wallpaper removing knife (same thing) - the adhesive is strong.

Putting the new tiles up was easy, but messy at times. You have to use this special ceiling tile adhesive, which looks like margarine (but grey) and spreads like margarine. I wouldn't put it on toast, though. Spreading it isn't easy (you have to cover the whole tile, rather than getting lazy and putting a spot on each corner). You start off with a blob and use a filling knife or a normal table knife to spread it all over, making sure it goes right up to the edges.

I chose to put the tiles parallel with the left wall so they'd be straight throughout, rather than working at some random diagonal like the previous decorators did (before my parents moved in I think, which was over 25 years ago). The before/after pics will illustrate that. Cutting all the fiddly little corners would've been difficult and wasteful. I can see why they did it - since the walls aren't straight, the tiles either line up with the left wall or the far one.. not both. So I had to trim varying size edges and stick them in the gaps. Hard to explain but it looks nice enough and I was guaranteed to make a mess if I'd tried the diagonal approach.

Trimming/cutting poly tiles takes practice. A long, very sharp knife such as a blade in a Swiss Army knife (which I used) or Leatherman seemed to work well. The trick was to slide the full length of the blade along the tile rather than stabbing away with the point, to make a clean edge. A ruler is also highly advisable.

In the end I'd say this was actually the easiest job of the whole project - sure the edges were a bit fiddly when they needed trimming but it was easy enough and I'm quite proud of the inside corner I had to cut!

Carpet laying

Getting everything out of the room was the difficult bit.

Pulling up and rolling the old carpet was easy - it'd become very thin and easy to handle over the years. The rubbery stuff underneath had turned into piles dust in some places and stuck to the floorboards in others, requiring a vacuum cleaner and scraper (the trusty filling knife again!) respectively.

The new carpet was quoted at about 1in too short and I wondered how to get around this (I chose a very nice blue offcut, which is much cheaper than buying a specific size carpet), but it wasn't a problem after all - it was way longer than quoted!

Laying it and trimming it to size was tough work. A stanley knife is what's needed really - I used an xacto craft knife at first and it sortof worked but created a rather ragged edge. I moved onto heavy duty scissors which were specifically designed for cutting things like carpet which was a reasonable compromise. It's important to cut so that you leave a little too much then trim it gradually to the size of the room otherwise you get gaps at the edge (I wasn't perfect with this at first but certainly not bad) - I put a very thin (2-3mm) line of carpet along the gap where I "wasn't perfect" to fill it in, which is not noticable, but either way it's the wall where the bed is flush to the wall so I'll never see it.

The difficult thing is making sure it's laid square and unrolling/unfolding it. Somehow it just came together, although it was very exhausting wrestling with it and getting it to lay down in the right places!

It's a thick carpet and now the door won't close properly. Oopsie. Nothing that can't be fixed without a wood plane though!

Fixtures, fittings and furniture

Ooh, the 3 'f's! That wasn't deliberate!

At the moment the walls are bare, just the wallpaper. I like it, nice minimal look, and will probably keep it that way for a while.

Heh, the light switch - The existing one had rounded edges! This was no good for the border I was to put around it to hide the bad wallpapering, as the borders have a perfectly square hole in the middle. Problem was to be solved by buying a new switch - a square one! Well, this neato remote dimmer switch was just begging to be bought so I went for it. You can either tap the touch-sensitive metal blob to turn the lights on or off (they fade in or out in a very cute fashion, rather than just turning directly on or off), touch-and-hold to set the dimming level or do any of those things from a remote control. I love it - getting out of bed is never easy for me, so it's nice to have it made easier by being able to reach for a remote control then fade the lights in gradually - all without getting up!

I put a big ol' network socket on the skirting board next to the phone socket. It looks fugly, but less fugly than the loose cable that was running in and coiled up.

I found an excellent desk in PC World of all places. Even though it was quite cheap, it's very well-made with decent wood (not real solid wood but not cheap chipboard either) and a metal frame. It has some neat little raised platform underneath which was probably meant for a printer but it accommodates my games consoles beautifully - PS2 under it, Xbox on top, Gamecube on top of that. Powerbook balanced on top of that when present (I'll get a Mac Mini one day). The mini hi-fi fits nicely where a computer tower was obviously supposed to be.

There isn't a lot of room on top, so I replaced the big-ass old tube television and separate flatscreen monitor with one wide flatscreen combo. It's fantastic - it does TV through an aerial, has s-video (I have one s-video cable which does PS2, XBox and GC with a switch on it) and acts as a PC (VGA) monitor into the bargain too at a widescreen resolution of 1280*768. If that isn't enough, it also has picture-in-picture support when in PC mode so you can have the TV in a corner of the PC screen. Brilliant. Would've cost a bit, but I 'inherited' it through a sortof debt payment owed to me so it wasn't a financial problem, yay!

Finally, during the trip to London I picked up a wardrobe from B&Q. Transporting it home with all the rest of the luggage was fun. Finally I have somewhere to hang shirts - YAY!

It's unusual as it's plastic with a bit like a tent covering over it. I would've gone for the same thing with a wooden frame really but this works and it even has drawers as well as shelves. Unsurprisingly for me (and the lack of space in this room) it's not entirely used for clothes - I have drawers full of gadgets, portable gaming systems etc as well as underwear. Shelves are used for games, discs, toolkits and other bits as well as t-shirts and jumpers. The wardrobe rail area shares its base with a safe, a money box (which automatically counts the money put into it - an old pressie) and other bits. A speaker sits on top of the wardrobe, with the other on the desk, for half decent acoustics. (I had them on the floor at first, it didn't sound all that good).

The pockets on the side of the wardrobe (which will be illustrated below) - not sure what they're for. Shoes or something? Either way, they're now filled with game pads (one in each pocket for PS2, xbox etc) and one for remote controls - go me!

And so there you have it. Finally I've moved most of my stuff back in and it's all neat and tidy. Even neater and tidier when the zippable front cover of the wardrobe is put down! It's such a more pleasant place to be in now and was worth the time and effort.

Conclusion & before/after pics

Click the images to see large versions.

BEFORE: Tattered pink wardrobe-type-thing - but when's a wardrobe not a wardrobe? When there's no means of hanging shirts in it! No rail, far too short anyway, and a shelf going through the middle!



AFTER: There, much neater! Room to hang shirts (hooray!), drawers and shelves too. Little junk on top, just a speaker. Haha spot the PS2 cases. And yes, those pockets on the left are full of games console control pads.




BEFORE: Diagonally-tiled ceiling with tiles falling off. Bleh.



AFTER: Retiled, square this time, with pattered tiles. Looks neat!



BEFORE: Check out that yucky old carpet. Ugh! And the cabling nightmare!



AFTER: A desk which seems to tidy itself and the cables for you (actually the're hidden behind it and underneath). Also check out the much nicer carpet... amazingly lucky find as it's just the thickness, quality and colour I was looking for with a decent pattern at a decent price. (Telephone and network points also visible)




(not every day you take a photo of some carpet, huh?)


BEFORE: The makeshift workstation. What...a...mess!



AFTER: A proper workstation, tidied up, with the new monitor/TV combo etc. Looks so much better.



BEFORE: Ugly, out-of-place shelf supporting random junk. A wall seeking desparate attention with very bad condidion paint!





AFTER: Check out that nice plain wall. Ahh just how I like it.



Sure, the wall probably looks similar - I chose wallpaper which was almost exactly the same colour as the old paint as it seems the perfect colour for bedroom walls and I like it. But hey, no shelf, no damage, all is great! I didn't want anything with too big a pattern as it's distracting (I want to play console games in here for a start!). But just to prove that it *is* different and there *is* a pattern:


(Not every day you take photos of plain walls either)

While we're at it, here's a pic of the funky new touch&remote dimmer switch (I'm getting really really 'sad' now aren't I.. I'm showing you pictures of a freaking switch):



One of the new blue door trim, and the (rather neat I thought) wallpaper border covering up the er.. mess.



The view looking out from the bedroom (loving the borders and the switch point!):



And looking in - a much neater scene than looking in used to be. (The wardrobe isn't really that transparent and ugly from the side, that's just the light messing with the camera.)



Whew!

Difficult to show in pictures, but everything looks sooo much neater and more pleasant than before. It took a lot of effort, but considering I spend so much time in here - definitely worth it.

Now, I feel like a more relaxing mood *grabs the remote and dims the lights* - lovelay.