laura ashley cherubs and ellies bedroom

fifichic.co.uk copied from my original blog
Well, its new years day and i have taken a moment out to put some pictures on of my daughters room, we are moving in 2 weeks and she is adamant she wants her next room to be very similar!! Except we are moving from a grand victorian manor house to a little 1930s 3 bed!!! But, it can be done and i will blog with pictures of the new room soon! In her current room she has laura ashley cherub toile and i`m determined to do this room on a much tighter budget so am swapping this £35 a roll wallpaper for a fabulous provencale pink toile from Direct wallpapers at £7.99 a roll!!
 I got them to send a free sample and its really lovely! Her french bed was an ebay find some years ago with original pink fabric in great condition! My advice with vintage and antique fabric covered beds is try and find one with fabric and upholstery that are in good condition because you can end up spending twice as much getting it recovered!
 The canopy of the bed was literally `knocked up` by me and my husband when the kids where at school, the curtains are from local charity shops and the panels where something made of a type of foam we had pulled off an old bookcase! Its amazing what you can do if you ignore the finish on items and just start looking at things in terms of shapes and what you can do if you paint etc! A bed fit for a princess..in fact my daughter has realised she has the closest bedroom out of her friends to the one in the disney `frog princess`!

















I always love ellies bedroom when its done up for christmas its like girl heaven!! Do excuse my children squeezing themselves into all the pictures...they like to be involved!

When we needed a `big girl` wardrobe for ellie recently i picked up this wardrobe for £15 at a charity shop, it was tired and unloved and had a brown door and lots of marks, i used some of the leftover wallpaper we had in the basement and lined the inside and panelled the door with more of the wallpaper and then painted the rest, it took around 2 hours at the most and she loves it!!


 The dressing table was from a london auction which makes it sound very posh and if you have never been to auctions i appreciate it can seem daunting but there is a reason that antique shop owners can make a living and the simple answer is they are getting it cheaper and then selling it on to you, i have been to loads now, its fun, frugal and despite reservations i have never scratched my nose and accidentally bought a van gogh!!!! Try it out, on quiet days if there are no reserves who knows what you could get...just remember there will generally be an add on fee at the end around 20%!!
Anyway i need to go and entertain my children!!! So bye for now, happy bargain hunting...xxxfifi