Upcycling An Old Mirror And Creating A Grown Up Bedroom

It’s been quite a while since I created a big girls bedroom for Emmy, turning it from a proper Nursery room with Teddy bears to a princesses room with purple walls and butterflies.

Since that transformation we have changed things even more, the biggest change was removing her desk unit which we had been using as a changing table and to dismantle the two sets of drawers which held it up, these were thrown out and the gap which was left was a perfect size to home a new double bed. Of course at the age of 7 a double bed isn’t needed however it gives us extra space if guests stay and has been great when she’s had friends over for a sleep over.

We replaced the lost drawers with some pink and white ones and she now has a rather large TV in her room too.

She absolutely loves her bedroom and has since started playing up there a lot more. For her birthday we gave her a CD played/radio and she can often be found dancing around her room singing along to her favourite music.

The one thing she was missing was a proper desk to do her homework at and settle down to write stories/colour – she’d outgrown her little kiddie desk but now due to the grown up double bed lacked space for a proper desk. I spent ages surfing the net for a solution, of course folding desks do exist but boy are they expensive – the one I had fallen in love with being a little over £300 which was out of our budget currently, the solution was to add a temporary desk and replace in a few years when she needs something sturdier and more robust.

This desk I purchased from Amazon for £26.95, it attaches to the wall with two brackets and to fold down you hold at the sides towards the back and lift up the desk slightly, the desk then folds down almost flat against the wall.

As this desk drops down it left no where to keep Emmy’s pencils and notebooks as they would have fallen to the floor when the desk was dropped, and as you can see the shelf above was rather full already – the drawers on the top shelf are made up from my monthly Birchboxes taped together and have Emmy’s hairbands etc. in them.

Red Candy stepped in with the perfect solution to our problem and sent Emmy these awesome cloud storage pots to keep her pencils in. They can be attached to the wall with screws or onto a mirror/surface with suction cups. These are really large and hold so much in them – just don’t place the rubbers in the bottom of them as they can be hard to find again when you need it.

We also received the Umbra Yook wall organiser which is what Emmy’s My Little Pony colouring book is sitting in, this is an ideal size for holding a couple of note books or as it is attached to the wall near the plug socket we stand Emmy’s tablet in while it is on charge – and will be a perfect place for charging her mobile phone when she gets one in her teenage years as of course we all know the dangers of charging phones being left on beds or carpeted floors.

The last thing Emmy needed for her room was a mirror, I wanted to hang this as close to the desk as possible so it could also double up as a dressing table – of course I didn’t want to have the mirror hanging over the desk otherwise she would get too distracted and homework would take a backburner.

I had a spare mirror which was mine from my teenage bedroom at my parents house but with a dark brown frame it just didn’t fit into the room. With some paint left over from when we decorated the hallway and a helping hand from Home Sense I set about upcycling this ready for Emmy’s room.

The first job was to visit our local Home Sense store with Emmy and choose some artificial flowers, we chose ones with small blooms which I could take off the stalks as I wanted to attach them to the mirror with a glue gun. I let Emmy choose the colours she wanted – after all it was for her bedroom.

Next I needed to remove the stickers I had added as a teenager, I soaked a cloth in warm water and left the cloth over the stickers for around half an hour, then they almost came away with a little scraping with a butter knife. I then cleaned the whole mirror and frame and left it to dry.

I wanted to paint it pink however only had red paint, easily fixed as I just added white paint and mixed together.

Painting the frame was a little trickier than I had hoped as really I should have prepped it with an undercoat but I am impatient like that. I needed 3 coats but these only took around half an hour to dry.

I wasn’t too worried about using masking tape over the glass as paint can easily be scraped off of that once it is dried.

Once it was completely dried, Emmy and I de-headed the flowers and I sewed together the ones which fell apart in the process. We then laid the flowers into clusters on each corner carefully using the flowers to cover a few streaky patches of painting, once we knew where we wanted them I used a hot glue gun to stick them into place.