The room that used to be the guests livingroom and bar area, was in a theme of a beach bar. Now I know we all have different tastes and no matter what house we all move into, we all want to put our own mark/ stamp on the place!

On one of the times we viewed the business, we spoke about what rooms they used for their own personal use and what rooms will work for us on a personal use, as having two dogs, staying at the top of the building might not be the best thing as we’d have to take the dogs right through the B&B.

The previous owners were very helpful and did all the paper work for having the bar moved into another room, who knew that had to be done? I thought that once you had a licence you could have the bar where ever you wanted on the premises, but apparently not!

The reason we moved the bar was because we needed a living and we moved it for the following reasons:
A) it’s so important that we have our own space and somewhere to be able to relax and switch off, just like most people do when they come home from work
B) this room is close to our bedroom so has easy access with the dogs. The room was only used for a lounge and bar, which didn't seam to get used too much!
C) the room we picked as our bedroom is so small that other then sleeping and changing in it, there isn’t the space to do much in there or we’d go crazy!
D) it’s also important to have somewhere to spend time as a family and somewhere to go when we have friends come to stay

This was the first room we decided to decorate. As there is wallpaper and boarders everywhere we thought this would be the best room to strip the walls first so we could see what state the walls were in and what we will be dealing with, as with the many rooms we have and with the high ceilings we needed to know what we were dealing with and how much each room was going to roughly cost to decorate.

It seamed to take forever, as there was 5 layers of wallpaper, which looks like it has been there for a very long time!
Most of the walls actually didn’t seam too bad. We got to stripping the last wall, and this seamed like the biggest job out of the whole room. As we were stripping the wall one part of it kept bubbling and warping. We then realised that it was plasterboard. We decided that the best thing to do was to pull the plasterboard off and replace it.

WELL, at the time I wished we hadn’t taken the plasterboard off, as what we found underneath was unexpected! I haven’t got the words, or even know how to describe what what we found so I think the photo tells you all you need to know!

It was a slight surprise!

When I was looking at designs, there were two things that I was thinking about:
A) we wanted something that would be totally different to the designs we had on the B&B, so we could relax when we were having time to our selfs
B) I love London, and I wanted to bring a bit of London with me to the seaside!

I had seen a few wallpapers that had different London designs, and I liked each one of them, but with having high ceilings and a limited budget, it became hard to decide which one. Every week I drove past a shop which had two wallpaper samples that caught my eye. I finally got the time to stop at the shop where I kept seeing these wallpapers. I finally decided on one wallpaper desgin, as it wasn’t in your face, just a bit of London style.

I knew I was going to cover two of the walls in photos, as I love to have photos of my friends and family around me, I personally think it’s better then art as they tell a story of our lives, and they are art to me. There are only two pictures on the wall that aren’t photos, one is what I find a cute map of London and one is a photo of me in a personally signed Liverpool shirt from Steven Gerrard, which was given to us on our wedding day and, I was so excited about, but the best thing was, It has MY NAME on it first!!!!

When I was working in a little village in Berkshire called Cookham, there was an interior shop that opened. I was a tad excited as taking on a B&B and having ideas it was great to speak to someone and get a few ideas and talk about what I was looking for. Tony Burden at tradeINTERIORSshop.com was fantastic, he gave me ideas, told me about designers and when I told him what I was looking for on the B&B side as well as our own personal rooms he was very helpful. What I loved about Tony and his staff is they knew what I was looking for and when they were out buying they would always look for things that I was interested in or things I may be interested in. They found two things that I fell in love with straight away and they continue to find pieces and designs for me.

Tony’s details are: Trade Interiors
tonyburden@btinternet.com
07947817681
07770325133
“The Boutique”
High Street
Cookham
Berkshire
SL6 9SJ

Please check him out as he has some great stuff and can find what you are looking for if he doesn’t have it. He found me two of what I think are the most quirky and funky items for this room. He’s helped me on some of the others and he continues to help me.Thank you Tony 

Once everything was wallpapered and painted I had to find lamp shades and curtains, luckily I found some lamp shades in B&Q, but they were a bit plain so I got some fabric pens and coloured in the land marks. I couldn’t find curtains in the right colour, but what I did find was a single duvet cover with London landmarks on, so my mum made them in to curtains!