Saving the Manor EP06 - Bedside Manor

Its fair to say that we always do everything in extremes… Like we are looking to buy a 3 bedroom cottage as our home, we end up buying an Estate, we are looking for a little project to do up, we end up buying a derelict house, we say we will work a couple of hours in the evening, we end up working until well past midnight, and the show was no difference. We packed in jobs that would have taken us well over a year to achieve in 6 months! How? adding 6 wrinkles in our face, one for every month that we filmed haha.

I have a confession to make, I struggled with getting overwhelmed while filming the show, and I am so thankful to have someone as amazing as Dean by my side. Its well known between our close friends and family that I can only focus in one thing at a time, whatever it is, studying, working out, working on the house and that includes spaces, I only thrive working with one room at a time. As much as we worked in one space per episode, we still had to make A LOT of decisions of what we wanted to do in each room, so we had to plan ahead of time so we could order products, many of them you have to buy weeks in advance if not months! Dean was vital for me in the process to calm me down so I could keep focused, I probably added an extra couple of wrinkles in his face during that process.

Identify the key elements

When we started designing the Hay Loft Bedroom Suite, we knew our key elements. Timber frame, cast iron window, and brick. The design of the space was very much there, as we just followed the timber frame division as the natural way to split the Bedroom. Having the cast-iron window central to the second space made it very obvious that we really wanted to make it as the focal point of that space so our brains started to tick along…

The Closet and Bathroom

Design goes in circles, things that go out of fashion come back a few decades later. I was never a fan of sinks in bedrooms, however, now, when I see them I look at them in a different way, I understand the why! Someone could be brushing their teeth freeing the actual bathroom for someone else to use.

We used that concept and we elevated it and ran with it… creating a foyer area where the sink could be the focal point in a more refined area but separating the shower and WC was a very exciting concept for us.

We wanted to be very theatrical and feel that every time you open a door there is that little reveal so we then decided to make giant double doors to make a proper entrance! When we made those doors we had pressure, as it was not easy to find wooden boards with that length so we didnt have too much margin for error and we got it wrong 3 times! luckily we managed to save the wooden boards by doing some adjustments, phew!

The Antique Dealers

Finding the vanity unit to create the sink was not an easy task as I had a clear picture in my head of what we needed plus Dean gave me quite accurate measurements of the size that it had to be… as we wanted to use off the shelf storage for the closet and the shower tray was a certain size so there wasn’t much play for the vanity!

I spent hours and hours online, I found some pieces but the prices were extortionate which if you buy a piece of furniture that pricey you would certainly not cut a hole in it. David and Jorge from Brownrigg were essential to finding the vanity unit. I knew them already from Instagram, we followed their antiques page for a couple of years, so I messaged them asking for help and told them what I was looking for… (I didn’t tell them about my idea on how I was going to use it though) as if it was meant to be they sent me an image of a vanity that they just got! I could totally picture it, but we thought we had to come clean and tell them what we were going to do in case they didn’t approve and few months later they saw it on TV!

THE disastrous Bed side tables

The finishing touches are our favourite things to do, so much meticulous work and time has been put into thinking about the placement of every socket, switch, light fitting, materials, paint colours etc so when you put final touches means the room is finally coming together.

The story of cutting a table in half was inspired from my family. My mum and my aunt inherited a table that they both loved, so they agreed to cut it in half so they could both have it and use it as side tables. The first time that Dean walked into my aunts house and saw “my mums table” he couldn’t work it out and said how cute that they both bought the exact same table, when I told him what happened he thought it was genius, so from that date we do that in areas where we can only put small beside tables, as we know we get a matching pair.

Of course when you are doing work with 5 people looking at you its a little bit distracting as you think… I can’t get it wrong and then you go and get it completely wrong! …but you know what I love that I cut the bedside table wrong only to get Deans truest reaction on camera! haha (Dean; that’s a lie Borja you totally did it wrong 😂 trying to get out of it on here 😂)

When Dean had the brilliant idea to buy a cheap pink bed to paint it in black, to save a couple of hundred pounds we did not take in consideration the amount of hours that was going to take us to do the job. Everything was going great until we had to apply a third coat of paint, we were busy on a different project, one of productions assistants said that they had some spare time if they could help us somehow, so Dean said - Sure you can give the last coat of paint to the bed. Famous last words as the poor chap tried his best but everything ended up with lots of paint running down, with lots of streaks … it wasn’t pretty! we of course couldn’t say anything as bless him he did his best, but the whole project went down hill when we tried to sand it to repair the job it looked worse and worse, so we ended up making it look ok for the episode but we changed the bed a month later for one that was black from the factory and we didn’t have to spend a week painting over and over again!

And we learnt our lesson that sometimes when you buy cheap it ends up being more expensive.