Bye Bye Beddie

I know, my puns are getting worse.

When our second house was in the throes of construction and Tom and I were twiddling our thumbs most weekends with nothing to do (*sigh*, those were the days!), we spent one entire Saturday walking up and down a particular street at Mt Gravatt that's lined with furniture shops (among other things). Our goal? To find a bedroom suite for our giant new master bedroom.

We didn't have a concrete idea of what we were looking for, but obviously with every shop we searched through our wishes got a little more defined.

And then we found this one.

And we fell in love. We also fell in love with the price, which was considerably less than some of the other prices we'd seen that day. So, in our enthusiasm we ordered a king bed, king mattress, two bedside tables, and two of those tall drawer units. All matching.

At the same store, we also found a suite that we thought would be perfect for our guest bedroom, so what the heck, we ordered that one too. Here's a photo of the queen sleigh bed once it was in position in our guest room:

And the bedside tables.

The two suites cost us a little less than we were initially budgeting for just the master bedroom suite, so we felt pretty pleased with ourselves

Here's the master bedroom all kitted out:

And a closer photo of the bed and the bedside tables (with the curtains still up - I removed these before the house went up for rent which was when the above photo was taken, because I wanted to keep them for our new place).

In the giant master bedroom at our old house, this suite looks perfectly sized. But in our much smaller bedroom at the new (but old) place? Not so much. We haven't even assembled the bed or brought in the two chests of drawers and bedside tables since we moved in (mainly because we've been trying to maintain a minimalist existence with all of the renovating and moving around we're doing), but even just the mattress takes up most of the room. This gives you an idea of that (although not a great one, I know):

Since I can't help but start leaping ahead and thinking about decorating the house in its finished state, I started worrying about how cluttered and overwhelming that dark bedroom suite would be in the room. Not to mention the fact that I think I've outgrown the matchy matchy suite look, and prefer the look of a more eclectic mix of items in a room.

The obvious solution is to get rid of it and refurnish with more appropriately sized (and styled) items. But knowing that and coming to terms with the prospect of selling (and therefore losing half the money we spent on the furniture in the first place) are two very different things. So far, in our downsizing to move out of our second house, we've only sold furniture that had either been handed down by our family or that we'd bought second hand ourselves. Standing on the other side of the seriously-discounted-second-hand-furniture divide feels very different to snagging a bargain on a second hand piece!

So I tentatively broached the subject to Tom, who I was expecting would veto any thought of selling the suite at a loss.

My fears were unfounded! Although he's as disappointed about having thrown money away on a suite that no longer suits us as I am (not that we predicted that we'd be moving so soon when we bought it), he agreed quite readily to moving on.

So it's bye bye giant beddie (and beddie tables and chests of drawers)! We'll keep the mattress (which we love), and eventually get a much more streamlined base for it and a few other smaller storage items for the room. Now I've got the go-ahead, I've got all sorts of ideas running around in my head for that room, just you wait!

As for the other guest bedroom suite, Daniel's been using it anyway (or he was during the time at our second house when we rented out the guest bedroom to homestay students), so he's going to take it off our hands at a similarly heavily discounted price.

Considering that we were still very much in the early stages of properly furnishing our second house when we made the decision to leave, it's a little ironic that we're now getting rid of the few pieces that we had actually bought for ourselves (including the hutch and buffet that are going to become permanent fixtures in the kitchen and the bathroom respectively, but them's the brakes when you move to a completely different house! Redecorating is a must, it seems! We've learnt our lesson now, and we're going to struggle to purchase large items brand new anymore (of course Louis doesn't count)!


The numbers-loving part of me would also like to point out that the money that we make on selling our bedroom suites will probably more than pay for anything new we need to buy for our bedroom. I've got DIY and repurposing ideas galore! So, since the cost of buying the furniture in the first place is a sunk cost, we may actually come out of this decision ahead!