All posts filed under: Room Edit

Renovation Budget

‘Fake it until you can make it’ – What do you do when your budget won’t stretch?

You may (or may not) remember I started working on a rather big and exciting project earlier this year. The Old Forge The plans for this cottage renovation and soon to be holiday let are all pretty much sorted and despite a slight glitch with planning (which was super annoying and dished out but a week before the build was due to start) it’s looking positive we can get started within the next few weeks **crosses fingers**. During the wait for all the faffy paperwork to be shuffled, signed and filed, we’ve been chugging away with the family home instead. They sure do love a project! The floorplan below gives you an idea of their home, how the nooks and crannies of the cottage fit together and how they’re used. The sections marked in red were the bits to be demolished ready for Phase 2 of the big build. You can see how small and quite fiddly the kitchen/dining space is, there are seven doors in and around the heart of the home, along with beams, …

The Red Room – Take 2

I’ve always talked about interior design being a process. So when people ask me how long a project takes, or how much it might cost… it depends on so many factors, it’s literally impossible to say. On initial consultation for The Red Room, the one thing that was staying was the red wallpaper. My job was to solve the layout issues and pull the room together. After lots of fiddling this was the overall vibe and plan for this room: BUT. As the homeowners began to remove more and more from the room, they quickly realised, the one thing we’d planned the room around, the red wallpaper, was now on top of the list of things they wanted to change. And do you know what? That’s fine. It’s completely normal. The number of times people have asked me to work around something, either to make the job simpler, quicker or more affordable, 9 times out of 10, they finally decide to bite the bullet and dismiss said item and finally go for what they wanted all …

New Project – The Red Room

New project time everyone! Yeah yeah!! This time it’s a 1930’s house that’s recently had a lovely extension across the back. This has given them a light and airy, family friendly, open-plan kitchen-diner. And two sitting rooms. None of which they really like anymore. Including this one, which they admit they never actually use. It’s accumulated bits of furniture over the years, but now it just doesn’t work as a dining room, a living room, a study….  Let’s just say it’s lost its way. Time for a re-design, a new layout and a new purpose. Oh goodie. This room is to become the new family TV room, but in its current set up, it’s really tricky to configure the space so the seating can all get a view of a TV in one of the alcoves. After spending a good few hours playing around with potential layouts, here’s what I came up with. It’s going to be fun. The biggest change we’ve made which completely free-d up the room was to block the original entrance …

How to: The Mood Board

Since my last post, a lot of you have asked what program or site I use to create my room edits and interiors mood boards. So I thought it would be useful to some of you out there if I spilled the beans. Anchorman does Danish Design I don’t use anything fancy. I’ve never dabbled with photoshop and haven’t downloaded anything onto my laptop. I have a Macbook Pro and a penchant for Google image. Oh and one more thing…. Mood board for the Office Refit …..Pages. Pages is a word processing application, similar to Word for Windows I guess. It came pre-loaded onto my Mac as a freebie, so I would never have thought a simple word processing app would have helped me to create mood boards. But it seems Pages has everything(ish) I need in order to give it a bloody good go. Dark and Moody Gentlemen’s Study Here’s how: Open Pages. And open a new blank, landscape document. This is now your canvas on which to begin creating your new room edit. What …

New project. New wallpaper

I’m back! After a well deserved week off from all things blog, i’ve caught up with things like cleaning the house, finishing off oodles of painting at home, having conversations with my husband about things that weren’t loft related and washing my hair. Feels so good to have our home back. And a teency bit of normal life, whatever that means. So now felt about the right time to introduce a new project i’ve been working on since December. Yes, another one. If you guys remember the Drawing Room project, then you’ll know why i’m excited to introduce it… … as it’s the bedroom above this very room. So you already know these guys are going to be up for something pretty special in their “soon to be” new guest bedroom. Here’s is the room before these guys moved in. In fact, these are the estate agent piccies… “Just shove it under the bed, John. No, all of it under the bed. No, you can’t see it. No it’s fine. Honestly.” It’s a very masculine room …

The Loft Extension – Wk 1

Operation Loft Extension is now officially GO. Levels of excitement are at an all time high here at Making Spaces HQ. I’m super busy working behind the scenes on this one and i’ll be showing you the whole process from start to finish over the next few months. Here was the space 10 days ago, just before we flew out to New York. The loft just about emptied and ready to rock. You can see it’s got a good head height. 2.9m to be precise with a floor area of around 5.5 x 8m. Spot the rather sexy exposed brick wall in there? Well obviously that’s staying. One week later: Day 1. Scaffold up, kettle on and materials everywhere. Day 2. The framework for the rear dormer starts to go up.   Day 3. The new roof steel gets lugged up to the top and positioned to give us the new roofline. We’re switching from a hipped roof to gable end, negating the need for two dormers. Day 4. The roof goes up over the dormer. …