Over recent weeks you may have noticed that some changes are afoot in the Cassiefairy household, particularly in the bedroom. The eagle-eyed of you might have spotted a blog post about my new grey bedding, followed in quick succession by a tester-patch of paint appearing on my bedroom walls. Yes, I’ve been getting the urge to decorate again.
I think it’s something to do with the summer holidays coming up that makes me want to update my home. Just knowing that my husband and I will have some time off together gets me thinking about trips to hardware stores and comparing paint charts. What’s the point of having a holiday if you can’t get some more work done, eh?! And when you’ve got a rather big project in mind, such as a complete overhaul of the bedroom, this has to be saved for an occasion when you can dedicate a decent amount of time to it.
So I’ve started looking for design inspiration, and pinning more and more adventurous colour schedules on Pinterest. I find that, after a week or two of general browsing and pinning, I start to spot patterns emerging within my interior design moodboards, and this really helps me to plan my next step. If I look back over my boards and find that there’s lots of one particular colour, texture or print, I can be sure that it will be one of the design elements that I must include in a room. I think Pinterest is great for this, and it’s a fab excuse to spend hours on the app completely legitimately!
The one style of room that keeps coming up over and over again on my bedroom board is dark walls. I’m not just talking a bit darker than the neutrals my home is currently decorated in; I’m loving dark dark walls. Grey, inky blues and even black are taking my fancy and although my bedroom is a small room I’m sure it can take these moody shades.
We all know that the way to make a small room look bigger is to make it lighter and brighter; painting walls in pale shades and taking away heavy window dressings to ensure as much light as possible bounces around the room to create a feeling of spaciousness. However, it appears that I want to do the opposite to my bedroom. I figure that the room is only used for sleeping, so it needs to be dark and cosy to induce sleep – why else did I buy a blackout blind last year?
Warmer tones look great in the bedroom too. I generally find dark rooms to be relaxing and create a feeling of warmth, and although this might not be ideal for summer, I know that I’ll enjoy the luxury of darkness enveloping the room during the autumn and winter. The only issue is that I just can’t imagine it in the room. I’ve spent hours sitting in bed in the evening – and I sometimes take a look in there during the day too – trying to imagine the walls painted really dark and whether this would feel oppressive.
The trouble is that I can’t really find out whether the room will look okay with dark walls without actually painting them. And then, what if I don’t like it? It’s considerably more difficult to take a dark wall back to a light colour than it is to paint it dark in the first place. And that is a little bit scary to me; taking that leap into the unknown worries me, even though every other time I’ve used darker or brighter colours around my home I’ve been really glad that I did.
I think that the only thing worse than painting the bedroom and not liking it, is not doing it at all. I really don’t want to live with rather scruffy magnolia walls any more and although my quick-fix book-page feature wall brought the dull room back to life, I think that it’s time for a bigger change. I wonder if the book wall will look good with a darker colour and survive the decorating process?! I’m confident that I’ll be painting my room in a dark denim blue or a moody grey during my holiday and I’ll be sure to report back on the process when it’s done so please pop back soon to see how I get on. And let me know if you’ve taken the plunge and painted a dark colour in your own home, I’d love to hear how it went so please leave me a comment or tweet me a photo to @Cassiefairy.
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