I briefly mentioned last week that Master Frugal has been unwell recently last week so I won’t go into it too much today other than to say that we’ve had his blood test results back and although they can’t say what’s wrong yet, they can say it’s not one of the ‘big’ things that we were worrying about. We have to go back again for more tests in a couple of weeks but we’re just happy at the moment that whatever it is isn’t as bad as we thought it could be!
In the meantime, we thought we’d try and help with his problem of getting to sleep at night by giving him a bit of a bedroom makeover.
I have no idea why he’s started to struggle with his sleep although he’s never been a child who needs a lot of sleep. I don’t let him watch TV in his bedroom, in fact his TV doesn’t even have an ariel so he can only watch DVDs and I can’t tell you the last time he actually watched one in there. He has an iPad that he’s allowed to watch his beloved Minecraft videos on up until a certain point but even that’s not close to his bedtime usually as we like to turn the TV and technology off and have a read together. Sometimes we have a warm drink, sometimes we have a light snack before bed and sometimes we don’t. There’s no apparent pattern to the nights he struggles to sleep but I’d say that there are at least three nights a week that he’s still awake when we go to bed.
In an attempt to do everything and anything that I could to help him with his sleeping issues, I decided that I would give his room a bit of a makeover. I wanted to make it less ‘busy’ if you know what I mean. He’s currently in the smallest bedroom in the house and although it’s a good size for a small bedroom, we still struggle to find a place for everything.
I always envisaged his room with a high sleeper so he could have a desk and storage underneath which would have been perfect for him and would have meant that we would have no storage issues at all but he’s completely against that idea and didn’t even really like the mid-sleeper bed we got for him a few years ago which means a new ‘normal’ bed was a priority. Unfortunately, getting rid of the mid sleeper bed meant losing all the space underneath it!
This photo from a couple of years ago isn’t great but it gives you an idea of the Before….
As you can imagine, a room makeover in January before payday is never going to have a big budget but I didn’t want to wait any longer in case we could help him sleep by making his room more comfortable for him.
Budget Bed
We were so lucky that we found a bed frame on one of our local Facebook selling groups for free. It was the bottom half of a bunk bed but I don’t think you can tell from looking at it! We struggled to get it in our car as the base was in one piece but we didn’t give up and ended up calling our local taxi firm who have a mini bus and asking them if they would pick us up with it, which they did for the bargainous amount of £5.00. My Dad bought both kids lovely memory foam mattresses to go on their beds just before Christmas and they are the most comfortable mattresses you can imagine so we just popped his mattress on top of the new bed frame, added some half price bedding that we picked up from Tesco for £5 and that’s the bed done for just £10 in total.
Budget desk
I really wanted him to have a desk, despite the lack of space but again I didn’t want to spend much money on it at this point. I then got an email from 02 telling me that as a Priority App customer I had been given a voucher for £10 off in Argos. I almost didn’t look because I thought there would be minimum sped terms and conditions or something equally frustrating but I’m glad I did because it was exactly what they said it was – £10 of in Argos. I ended up buying the cheapest desk, not only was it the cheapest at £12.99, it was also the most compact wooden desk they had and with my voucher, I paid £2.99 for it. I also bought his chair from Argos and although it wasn’t a massive bargain at £17.99, it was reduced from £29.99 so it’s still a good deal in my eyes.
De-clutter and Organise
He’s a bit of a hoarder like his Mum but I managed to convince him to get rid of LOTS of his things – we ended up filling three black bin bags for the charity shop and that’s without all the random bits that ended up in the bin. Then we sorted out everything else and made sure that everything has a place of it’s own. I’m trying to get him to buy into the ‘put it away before you get something else out’ philosophy but I’m not sure he’s completely on board yet.
Bedside Cabinet
Even with all of the de-cluttering and organising we’ve done, the room is never going to be huge and we’re still going to struggle for storage so rather than go for a bedside cabinet we decided to use a storage box that he keeps his WWE wrestling figures in. He just takes the things off the top of the box when he plays with them and puts them back on when he’s done.
And that’s the whole room finished, including a new bed and a new desk for around £30. Not bad when you consider that Master Frugal describes his new room as ‘awesomely amazing’ and has said thank you for it about 50 times in the couple of days since it’s been finished.
By the way, the photos in this post aren’t great but they’re taken by Master Frugal because he wanted to show you the best bits of his new room. 😉
