My bedroom took 8 years to finish – here's why I'm glad I didn't rush it

Interior designer and content creator Rebecca Constable is one of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing her thoughts on demystifying the process of designing and decorating a home, and helping people work out where to spend and where to save.

It took us 8 years to finish renovating our bedroom. In that time we added two children to our family, lockdown came and went, and I tried out a number of careers. But, despite the very long timeframe, I’m actually glad it wasn’t something we did in a matter of weeks or months. Of course, we haven’t been sleeping in a building site for the past eight years, but rather a room that is perfectly livable, just not quite finished.

Social media has a way of making you think renovating should be quick and high impact, mainly so you can delight your audience with a drastic transformation, with just the swipe of your hand across the camera lens. However the reality of doing any kind of renovation quickly, is high stress, high cost and often a number of wrong decisions due to the first two factors.

Where possible, I prefer to renovate slowly. It may not be so exciting or impressive for those following me on instagram, but I think the end result is always better for a number of reasons.

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Firstly, a slow renovation gives you the time to work out what patterns, colours and materials work together in a room. There is nothing worse than having to make a design decision, under pressure, because your trades need an answer that afternoon. I prefer to choose one paint colour, or one fabric and slowly build out the room scheme around that.

For this room we started with a fabric called Chella from Romo fabrics, which we used for the headboard. This became the reference point for the rest of our design decisions. Paint colours, fabrics and artwork were then chosen based on this initial fabric.

Secondly, a long renovation gives you time to slowly acquire furniture and items that are unique and mean something to you. When you’re trying to fully furnish a room all at once, you inevitably end up needing to buy a load of stuff. What's more, the need to complete a room often means we compromise when trying to find the right piece for the space. We go with whatever we can find in that moment, that can be delivered quickly, with the budget we have left. If you allow the room to slowly evolve you can hunt for, make, and maybe even inherit pieces that are from people and places special to you.

In our bedroom we have a painting that was painted by my grandmother. It was handed down to me by my mother, a number of years after we started renovating this room. Fortuitously, the colours worked beautifully with the fabric on the headboard and we also used it as another reference point when choosing our curtain fabric.

Thirdly, living in a room helps you work out what doesn’t work! I used to have my dressing table in the alcove by our fireplace, but of course it turned out that the light was not very good for doing my makeup there. Thankfully we hadn’t made any concrete plans that revolved around the layout. We quickly worked out that putting built-in-wardrobes in the alcoves was a far better use of space, and placing the dressing table between the windows worked perfectly.

You can’t possibly know the best layout for a room until you’ve lived with it for a while. Of course there are principles around layout that you can follow, but there is nothing quite like living with a setup to help you work out what actually works.

One of the best things about our slow renovation is that we had the time to save for some really special pieces. The antique bedside tables were added a year after the headboard, the armchair in the corner a few years after that. And we waited a long time until we could afford to have made-to-measure curtains for our bedroom. In the meantime we made do with things that we already had, not wanting to compromise on the pieces and being happy to wait until we could afford them.

Delayed gratification is a real thing, and it is much more fun to still have pieces arriving for our room all these years later.

Finally I am a huge believer in the fact that you do not need to wait for a space to be finished in order to enjoy it. A candle and a lamp are all it takes to make a space feel warm and cosy, even if it’s missing half the furniture or the walls have chipped paint. Invite people in, enjoy your home, don’t wait for it to be perfect.

So our bedroom may have taken 8 years to renovate, but in that time we have enjoyed many mornings, all crammed into bed as a family of five. Christmas stockings have been opened, birthday breakfasts have been enjoyed, and neither the children, nor my husband, have cared about the fact that we had stained curtains and curtain poles that looked like they could fall down at any minute. It has been a place of respite for us, in all its iterations. The lovely wallpaper and the antique bedside tables that we now have, are simply small additions to a room that has already given us so much.