Living in an old (pre 1900) house means that it’s not exactly built for warmth, and I tell you what, those Victorians must have been pretty warm blooded to survive a winter with no central heating! Although I guess they had open fires in their day, sadly they’ve all been blocked up now! We’ve been thinking of ways to try an make our bedroom warmer especially, as it has two outside walls and a driveway beneath it, so we don’t get any benefit from rising heat! Oh, and a gigantic sash, single glazed window! Obviously changing the window to a double glazed one would be preferable, but because of the age of the building and the are we live in we need planning permission, plus a heck of a lot of money as we’d want to do both the bedrooms at the same time so the windows matched. Also the current frames are painted dark grey, so we’d need coloured PVC to make sure everything matched! We have a thermal blind in place too but I’m not really sure it does much at all!
Something else that we’ve contemplated is installed two fitted wardrobes into the alcoves either side of where the chimney breast. At the moment we have a chest of drawers in one but there is a lot of free space above it, and in the other one we have Arlo’s cot, which of course won’t be there forever! After a bit of research I’ve found out that you can add insulation to a wall to make it thicker and therefore retain more heat, and to hide it after putting a fitted wardrobe in would work well. Our Alcoves are deep enough to allow for a few inches more space behind them, and it would also give us a lot more storage space in the bedroom too!
I’ve mentioned before that I want to try and ‘Kon Marie’ our home; de-clutter everything and give everything a place of its own. I have already started with clothes, and have whittled my own clothes down to a semi capsule wardrobe, although there is still a bit of work to be done! Currently everything is kept in chests of drawers which means I can’t easily see everything (I just don’t have time for the fancy folding and standing things upright in drawers just yet!) and I think that having things hung nicely would make deciding what to wear a bit easier in the morning! I might even go so far as to hang up an outfit for each day at the start of the week! Or is that taking it a bit too far? Anyway I’ve been pinning away for some inspiration, you can see the whole board below but the image above is pretty similar to the layout of our room, with the wardrobe being set back into the alcove, and the top image is like my dream – old fashioned fitted wardrobes with a modern twist, utilising all the space above the bed that normally gets wasted!