My girls are growing up and, while I am more than happy to get past the sleepless nights and potty training stage and into the stage in which they are more like proper people (albeit small ones), I am sad that they’re growing up so fast. Even as I write that my brain is screaming CLICHÉ!; but it’s true.
Lily has been in the small nursery-style room since Esme was born, but now Esme’s getting bigger and is now at the point where she can move out of our room and into the nursery, so Lily needs a new “big girl’s bedroom”. And this needs a bit of a revamp!
Lily’s Weird and Wonderful Accessory Choices
I don’t have a great eye for interior design, truth be told, but I’ve found that planning Lily’s new bedroom has actually been pretty fun. Colin and I have tried to involve her as much as possible in choosing simple items for her new room so it feels more like hers and helps to ease her into her new surroundings, and this has made it part of the fun. So far, she’s chosen Disney Princess bed sheets (predictable) and a Toy Story wall clock (less predictable). The rug she’s picked is turquoise and her bed side lamp is bright pink (matching the Disney Princess sheets at least!). And we’ve stopped there with the choosing; it seems my daughter has even less of an eye for matching home accessories than I do!
(TIP: Just in case you plan on enlisting your child’s help in choosing items for their bedroom, rip out affordable options from catalogues or take pics of the items to show them; if they can’t see alternatives you can control the cost a little! Colin and I have done this because we know in a couple of years we’re going to have to replace a lot of the mis-matching items!)
Designing the Room Using Home By Me Software
Another reason why designing Lily’s new room has been more fun than normal redecorating tasks is because I’ve used a new type of software recommended to me by one of the mum’s of Lily’s friends. Home By Me allows you to input the dimensions of the room you’re focusing on (or your whole house and every room in it if you’re that ambitious! I’m not quite there yet…), creates a plan of the room, and then you can add details, such as where the plug sockets, radiators, doors are located etc, and then play around with where you want to put furniture.
You can see from the picture below, I’ve got the layout of the room, the door, the window, the radiator and 2 plug sockets included all mapped out, and it’s so easy to use!
Furnishing the Room (now for the really fun part!)
Once you’ve designed the room you have the option of furnishing it. Firstly, you get a fun little avatar so you can see what the room looks like from certain viewpoints. So cool!
Secondly, you get to browse and select furniture to see how it fits into the room. Obviously, this is great because you don’t even need to bother using tape or whatever to measure things out in the room to see if and how things fit together- it’s so easy! And you can look at the room from both 2D and 3D viewpoints, which I found really useful.
Final Thoughts
While I’ve shied away from redecorating and redesigning rooms in the past, I’ve actually found the task of putting together Lily’s new room really enjoyable. I imagine this is probably a combination of finding it fun to include my daughter in the planning, but also because the task has been made a thousand times easier with the Home By Me software! If you are thinking of resigning a room – or your whole house if you’re a real home interior badass! – I would absolutely recommend this software.
