I introduced you to my guest bedroom in a recent post where I’ve made a few bargain changes (totalling less than £100) to take the room from “a room with a bed and a desk” to a “guest bedroom with a desk” and eventually hope to take it to “guest bedroom slash home office”.  If you missed that post, you can read about that here.

Well, I’m still in the process of “zhushing up” the room and I’ve picked up a couple of budget bits to help continue to pull together the colour scheme of bright cherry red and brilliant white.

First up, I swapped out the frames on the prints I purchased from Etsy.

Here’s how they looked when I showed them to you the first time…

I realised when I took the pictures how plain the prints looked in white frames against the white walls.  I was considering painting the frames red until I popped into Sainsburys at lunchtime the other day and they had these bright red glossy pretties on clearance for £3.50 each.  Bargain!

Cute no?  Now the frames really pop against the white background.  It makes me very happy.

I also found these little sweeties on eBay for less than £5 for a set of 2. 

So at that bargain price, I had to get two sets of course.  Well, it would have been rude not to.

At the moment, they look a bit bare but I plan on hanging a little sign saying ‘welcome’ or ‘make yourself at home’ or something along those lines from the hooks but leave a couple bare so that guests can still hang their things on them.  Practical and pretty?  Why I don’t mind if I do, thank you.

I also got a couple more fat quarters of fabric from eBay and made 2 cushion covers this weekend to replace the dark red ones I had on the bed. 

As I seem to be unintentionally creating a bird theme here (with my peacock print, my birdie chair and my birdie hooks), I figured I might as well add some chickens to the mix! Here’s a sneak peak of one of the fabrics (the white fabric with the red chickens).  Bless, don’t they look all happy??  They are obviously free-range birds!

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Hopefully I’ll get the rest of the bits for the last cushion cover this week and will be able to share my trio of patterns with you.

I decided that I am quite enjoying the mix of fabrics and patterns in this room and so I’m just going to continue going with that.  I think perhaps because it is a monochrome scheme, it doesn’t end up looking too busy.  One other thing I’m conscious of is that this is a white room with red accents, rather than a red and white room.  Does that make sense?  The red can be quite overpowering so I think using it in small doses against a substantially larger base of white makes it seem less “Valentine’s Day Gone Wrong” and more fresh and bright.  That’s my theory anyway.

Hmmm what else?  Oooh speaking of patterns, I think I found my wallpaper for the room!  It’s funny because I had a sample of this paper from a number of months ago and dismissed it for being too subtle but now that the other changes in the room have taken place, I realised it’s actually perfect.  Again, you’ll see it’s a much smaller percentage of red against a mostly white background.  It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for and I am hopeful it’ll work well in the room.

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Isn’t it funny how rooms evolve after a while?  And how one thing may not work right away but later on you realise it was actually right all along?  Wanna hear the best part?  Only £19.99 per roll!  Get in!

There’s also a little project I’ll be doing involving a can of red spray paint.  No, vandalism is not in my future so you don’t have to worry about that.  Stay tuned…

With regard to the ‘desk’ side of the room (which I haven’t shown you yet because it’s still kind of ugly), I have started to devise a cunning plan for the desk (currently a bland laminate but entirely practical number) but I need to talk W around on that one first!  I also need to look at replacing the big black comfortable-but-falling-to-bits-and-doesn’t-match-my-colour-scheme chair we’ve got going on in there.  That one may take more convincing.  More on that later…

So, I feel like the room is coming together now.  Sometimes I actually just go in and look at it because the bright cheery colour makes me smile.  Am I the only sad one who does that?  C’mon, tell me that I’m not because I reckon Pablo thinks I’m a little mad.   Sometimes he follows me into the room (he does this sometimes, just follows me around) and I just stand there, looking and dreaming of what else I’m going to do, and he’ll look up at me and meow as if to say, ‘What ARE you doing?’  Yeah, when your pets start to question your sanity, it’s never a good thing.

All other images my own.