I have a little weekend ritual that I wanted to share with you today. Every Friday afternoon, I clean the bedroom; I throw the windows wide open, I air the mattress and duvet and I change the bedding. It’s become a habit over the past couple of months since I decorated the bedroom. I take pride in the space and it’s now one of my favourite rooms in the house. My Friday afternoon preparations really get me in the mood for the weekend, and I think that my plumping of pillows and dusting of shelves is my attempt to make the bedroom as hotel-like as possible! I feel like having a clean, fresh, cosy bedroom sets the tone for the weekend; there’s no more tidying to do, just relaxing! 
Apparently I’m not alone in this weekly ritual, with a survey on NetMums showing that 40% of us change our sheets every week and another 36% change them every fortnight. Only a 5th of people leave it a month before changing the bedding and a rather icky 1% only do it once a year. That said, I’m not really changing my bedding because they are dirty and could probably leave it a little longer between washes, but I’m doing it for the reasons I mentioned above, to freshen up the room and get ready for the weekend.
My absolute favourite luxury is getting new bed linen and although I love my rose-design bedding (which I’ve had since hubby and I got married 11 years ago) it’s an extra special treat when I find some new sheets that coordinate well with my books-in-the-bedroom theme and I can really up the hotel-factor in the bedroom for the weekend. I love, love, love the striped sheets I got this week because they are the same crispness as proper hotel sheets and they feel both cool and cosy at the same time. The minute I shook the duvet out and tucked it around the bed, I felt the urge to dive into it and never get up again. I wanted to take a whole day off work, just to enjoy lying in bed. I think it was the noise that the sheets made that had me mesmerised; the rustle of linen that you only hear in hotels – a sound similar to walking on fresh snow. Sigh.
I’d previously got some white sheets back in the winter when my bedroom makeover started, and I really don’t know what I was thinking. As someone who is a notorious tea-spiller, a push-over of a cat owner, and married to someone who likes to make breakfast in bed, it really wasn’t practical to have bright white sheets. Put it this way; they didn’t stay bright white for long! Before every wash I painstakingly pre-treated paw prints and I even bought ‘back to white’ miracle laundry sachets but to no avail. I’d definitely call them off white now, and although I still love the feel of them and will continue to use them, I am really pleased that I now have sheets that are clean and fresh, and that will be less likely to show tea drips and make-up smudges.
By the way, you may have spotted that I’m reading Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace, I always find his books laugh-out-loud funny and I’ve got Friends Like These lined up to read next. Have you read either of these and what do you think of them? Any opinions and recommendations of future books of a similar comedic ilk would be gratefully received.
Okay, I admit it. I’m in bed right now as I write this blog post. I’m basically never leaving the bed again and snuggling under the new duvet is about as good as it gets on a Saturday morning. And I can see myself doing more and more of this as the days get darker and the temperature drops as we head into autumn. Time for a nap I think… 
