Sorry, I got a bit distracted there blogging about things that caught my attention on TV and in Kevin McCloud’s book; 43 Principles of  Home. I must gt back to my theme of looking at the options for new fitted bedroom furniture or fitted wardrobes.

We discussed the DIY and flat-pack options, both of which are popular and practical as long as you  are aware of the limitations.

The third option is to consult with one or more of the professional design, build and fit companies. These are easy to find in the pages of newspaper supplements and home-interest magazines or by googling ‘fitted furniture’. This will give you the choice of about one and a half million hits!

So, how do you sort through so many websites to find the fitted furniture supplier for you? Firstly, add a regional suffix to your search criteria; such as ‘fitted furniture Surrey’. That should leave you with a managable number of around 50,000, although, you probably won’t go far beyond the 1st or 2nd page .  Or you could add a more specific prefix such as ‘bespoke’ fitted furniture.

The next thing to do is to consider what the types of hit can tell you about the companies that appear. The first three links at the top of the page and those on the right hand side are PPC or pay-per-click adverts, if you click on one of these a small sum of money, say 10p to a pound or two, will be charged to the advertiser and eventually to you the consumer.

You may then see some local ‘place’ links that are another revenue raising idea of Google’s and can be helpful if you wish to confine your search to a very localised area, remember: Google knows where you are!

The next links are the ‘organic’ or ‘generic’ listings which will take you to the websites that Google has explored and concluded that they contain information relevant to your search, arranged in descending order of relevance. These rankings are chosen by Google by objective analysis of the content but do not indicate a recommendation.

Next up: web search directories.

Before moving on from the DIY option for your new fitted bedroom furniture I would urge you to look at my post for 23 June 2010 How to avoid mould in fitted bedroom furniture and to think very seriously about putting backs on your fitted wardrobes.

The second, and less challenging, option is to look at the array of flat-packs available from stores such as Homebase and Ikea. Ikea, for example, offer excellent value for money and provided you can make their fixed door widths, of 500 mm for a hinged door and 700 mm for a slider, combined with fixed depths and heights work in your spaces, this route need not cost a lot more than the full DIY alternative and will cerainly save you a lot of mess and hastle.

Flat-pack furniture is not as robust as professionally made bespoke fitted furniture and will be far more limited in the range of styles and finishes, but for the vast majority  of home owners this is the route most often taken, if only for reasons of affordability.

People extending, improving or upgrading their homes will usually have to set themselves priorities and often the fitted bedroom will have to wait in line behind the fitted kitchen, refurbished bathroom, landscaped garden, new carpets and replacement windows. However, and unless you plan to keep your clothes in those natty cardboard storage units provided by the removal companies, you will need wardrobes in short order. The alternatives will often be the storage rails on wheels (like these) secondhand wardrobes or cheap flat-packs from the home improvement sheds.

You may not get the luxury bedroom you aspire to in the short term but the self asembly compromise should give you up to five years service, during which time you will will be able to formulate you requirements whilst saving up for the day you can afford to call in a professinal fitted furniture specialist like Options Fitted Furniture.

This time you will be spending thousands rather than hundreds of pounds and this time you need to be absolutely certain that you have made the right choices.

More on this topic next week.

On my last post I talked about how to design a fitted bedroom and considered how we might make your dream come true. The first option that I want to look at is the DIY route.

Frankly, unless you are a passionate amateur cabinet maker, I would advise buying your drawer units and bedside cabinets ready made from a shop or explore the secondhand option with a view to personalising your finds with some painting and distressing for the popular shabby chic-look.

The area where the DIY might be worth considering is the fitted wardrobes. First decide on whether you want sliding or hinged doors and have a look at what doors are available from your local home-improvement shed. Alternatively, you can find wardrobe doors by Googling; these are likely to be wood effect, vynil wrapped mdf and will probably come in standard sizes.

Having chosen your wardrobe doors, you will need to decide on the carcassing or framing. A popular do it yourself option is to make the interior shelving from laminated particle board, popular name Conti Board which some of the larger sheds or timber merchants will cut to size. This board is available in a range of sizes, up to 2 metres by 60 cm, ready edged, which is ideal for shelving and carcassing. Many of the larger DIY sheds offer a cut to length service, so I suggest that you design your wardrobe interior on paper and order your boards ready cut.

You will probably need to ’scribe’ some of the boards to fit to your walls; this is done by offering the board to the wall and using a drawing compass to to follow the line of the wall whilst marking a pencil line on the board and cutting with a jig saw. Use a down-cut jigsaw blade to acheive a neat edge from following the pencil line. Avoid cutting along the length of the board on any edge that is not going to be hidden by abutting the wall; such edges will require edging, which can be done with iron-on melamine edging, but be warned that this type of edging is not very durable and is likely to come away from the edges and is extremely brittle and prone to crack. Unfortunately, the better quality PVC edgings used by modern manufacturers of kitchen and bedroom furniture can only be applied with a multi-thousand pound edge banding machine and is not generally available to the DIY market.

Other options for the shelving or carcassing are mdf or plywood which will need painting.

I would recommend buying a good DIY manual that has a section on making your own wardrobes and be prepared for mess and upheaval lasting over several weeks.

Having designed the layout for your fitted bedroom, firstly we positioned the bed and then decided where to put the wardrobes and low level cabinets if applicable.

Now, how do we fulfill the dream? The options are: do it yourself, hire a carpenter or go to a specialist fitted bedroom supplier.

The DIY option can involve buying flat pack bedroom furniture from a major chain such as Ikea B & Q or Homebase, buying timber and raw materials from a timber merchant or seeking out a specialist bespoke furniture maker who is willing to sell you the wardrobes and cabinets on a supply only basis for you to install.

In truth, the installation cost of fitted furniture is usually only about 15% of the total price and the saving is marginal and likely to be lost completely in the event of damage during fitting or a mismeasure, both of which are costs that the professional installer would have to cover. Further, a self installation will probably annul the makers guarantee which should be for a minimum of five, and possibly ten years.

The only serious way to make serious savings as a DIY project is to buy cheaper quality, mass produced and standard sized units from a ’shed’ or to make the whole thing from scratch.

Making it all yourself can be an exciting challenge but you will need good carpentry skills, professional quality tools, including, at a minimum, a power screwdriver, a jigsaw, and a good range of hand tools.

You will also need plenty of time (an average DIY fitted bedroom project would take a minimum of two days using flat pack units and probably  ten days or more if you are making it all from raw materials), possibly spread over several weekends if you need to fit it around the day job. What else you may need is understanding neighbours and a very tolerant partner.

Next week, I will look at what materials to work with and how to set about the construction of your dream fitted bedroom.

So, we have decided where the bed is to go and on which wall to place the fitted wardrobes.

That might be enough because you may have now filled all the available space or because your choice is to have the drawers and cabinets free-standing. Perhaps you would rather not have everything to match or you prefer a few antique or distressed pieces within you design scheme.

Hovever, you may like the clean lines and lack of nooks and crannies of a modern fully fitted bedroom, or perhaps you just wish to maximise your storage whilst minimising the tidying or maintenance aspects.

You will probably need one or two bedside cabinets or, ‘night stands’ to our Amercan friends. these are often free standing, for ease of bed making, and can include one two or three drawers, an open space or a cabinet door, or a combination of any of these. Sometimes, a pull-out tea tray is added.

Many women now prefer to make up in the bathroom these days but some still like a dressing table in the bedroom, this is usually made up of two stacks of drawers with a kneehole space in between; often with a shallow drawer for make up or jewellery. This bridging drawer can have divisions and felt lining for seperate types of jewellery.

Other requirements might be: a window seat, a particularly nice option if you have a good view, and this can also provide extra storage for bulky items such as spare duvets. is usual to have a radiator under the window and this can be seen as a barrier to a window seat, but as you can see on the plans below, their are ways around this.

This is a typical design for a fitted bedroom in a south London victorian house with high ceilings and of generous proportions.

More on designing bedroom furniture next week.

OK, so you have decided on the size of bed and where to put it in the bedroom.

The next important decision is on which wall to put the fitted wardrobes.

In a very small bedroom, it is possible to have what is called an overbed arrangement; i.e. a wardrobe either side of the bed with a bridging cupboard over the bed.  Not the ideal solution in my view but it does maximise the storage. The disadvantage is that you wake up in a cupboard!

Of course, in some modern houses and flats the bedrooms are so small that an overbed is the only solution.

Older houses often have a chimney breast in the bedroom and that feature is normally too narrow to put a double bed on, and it is on the opposite wall to the door, making the door wall the obvious one for the bed, which is aeshetically better on that side rather than having wardrobes restricting the door opening or imposing on the entrance. Effectively, the chimney wall is usually the default choice for wardrobes.

The next decision is whether to opt for a separate installation in each recess and, if there is room, some cabinets, drawers or a dressing table on the chimney breast, possibly with a shallow bridging cupboard over. One limiting factor is that chimney recesses are rarely of a width that divides easily by the standard 400 mm, 500 mm and 600 mm wardrobe door widths. One solution here is to opt for a bespoke fitted furniture maker who can make the doors in the necessary width.

Or, you can take the wardrobe doors right across the chimney and either have reduced depth storage in the middle section or, space permitting, choose the traditional break-front option.

In a reduced depth wardrobe, the choices include: shoe racks constructed from parallel rows of hanging rail, sloping shoe shelves with a small frontal lip, narrow shelves with an upstand at the front and, possibly, two or three front-to-back hanging rails for coats or dressing gowns.

More design ideas for fitted bedrooms next week.

Hello, welcome back from the Christmas break and happy New Year to all our readers.

I ended 2010 with a series of blogs posts looking at how to plan or design your own home office or study and I thought it might be good to start 2011 with some thoughts on how to set out a fitted bedroom.

The first point of reference is, of course, the size and position of the bed. Most people prefer to sleep facing or at a right angle to the window raher than with their head to the window, principally so that they can see the sky on waking. Also, the window wall is often the coldest part of a bedroom and usually where the radiator goes, making it dificult to have a headboard which might, in any case obscure part of the window and rob the room of light.

The size of the bed will partly be a factor of whether it is to be a single or a double (I have never heard of a triple bed but it might be an option). Couples occasionally opt for twin beds but this option is largely reserved for the elderly, young children sharing or the stars of early 20th century American romantic comedies. Bed sizes can be confusing; in the UK the traditional double bed has always been 4ft 6inches (135 cm) wide, a small double is 4ft (12o CM) wide and a single 3 ft (90 CM) wide. Small singles and bunk beds are usually 2ft 6inches and in the 1960s a large double or king size of 5ft or 1500 CM was introduced and today we have a super king size 6ft (180 Cm wide). These are still the designations given by the National Bed Federation and the Sleep Council, however, these sizes refer only to the mattress size and the frame or bed ends can add a considerable amount.

A further complication arises from the fact that we now import beds and mattresses from all over the world and in particular from Europe and, to a lesser degree, America. All of these countries have their own standards for bed sizes and, no doubt we will soon be buying from the developing world and certainly China with a whole new range of ’standards’.

So, before even thinking about designing your own fitted bedroom or talking to a fitted bedroom designer, start by deciding what size bed you are going to use and how much spoace it will need.

Next time I will be looking at what you need in the way of cabinetry.

This is a topic on which I have touched before but it is one that continues to crop up when talking to clients about fitted bedrooms, so I thought it might be helpful to go into more detail.

I am often told that clients have experienced problems on opening fitted wardrobe doors, and particularly when picking out seasonal clothes such as ski wear or last year’s summer clothes that have been in the cupboard for perhaps 6 to 11 months since their last wearing, and finding that the clothes have mould stains that can be difficult, or even impossible, to clean.

It is often assumed that this is the result of penetrating or rising damp, and it might be where the bedroom is on the ground floor or the property is pre 1930s and does not have a cavity wall.  However, with the majority of bedrooms being at first floor level or higher and most houses, going back to the 19th century, being of cavity wall construction, the cause probably lies elsewhere.

If any part of a fitted wardrobe, even one end, is on an external wall or a chimney breast the internal surface of that wall is likely to be colder than the ambient temperature in the room, particularly in a centrally heated house in winter.

The warm air in our houses absorbs moisture from our persperation, exhalation and cooking.  We open a wardrobe door, perhaps only once in the morning and once in the evening and moist warm air displaces the still, drier, cooler air within. We go off to work or go to bed and as the outside surfaces of our home cool, heat is drawn outwards from the inner walls, cooling the surfaces and the air trapped within the furniture which gives up its humidity and precipitates some moisture onto the inner surfaces of the wardrobe and onto the clothes stored there. The next time we open the cupboard doors the interior warms up and we have created the perfect moist, dark environment for a small mushroom farm.

The solution? If you are getting quotations for bespoke fitted bedroom furniture from companies like Options Fitted Furniture insist that the wardrobes are fully carcassed, that is; completely sealed, with solid (ideally 18mm) backs to the carcasses and that there is still air space of at least 30mm between the backs and the walls.  It may cost a little more than what is usually refered to as front-frame bedroom furniture but it will smell a whole lot nicer and your precious clothes will be safe.

How do you finish off a run of fitted wardrobes?

Sometimes a slab ended wardrobe can be an unattractive option, particularly near to a doorway.

There are a limited number of options available, they break down into: open ended display shelves, an angled cupboard with open display above or a wardrobe with an angled doors.

The attached photos and sketch will give you some idea but I would love to hear of an alternative suggestions.

A frequently asked question about fitted wardrobes is whether they should have backs on them or whether they should just be front frames with the walls and ceiling forming the interior.

If the wardrobes are entirely on internal walls then there may be a case for not having backs if you are desperate for every cubic inch of storage or because the room is so narrow that you need to restrict the wardrobe depth to 550 mm.  The cost saving is marginal and you will not get the feel of a proper piece of fitted furniture whenever you open the doors.

However, if even one end of the wardrobes is on an external wall think very carefully about the condensation risk. On a winter morning you open your wardrobe doors and let in a flow of centrally heated air that comes into contact with the cool external wall, you close the doors and trap that warm, moist air inside the wardrobe and it spends the next ten hours cooling and precipitating its moisture content onto the walls.  Much later you open your wardrobe again and let in another batch of warm air to repeat the process through the night.  Don’t be surprised if your clothes start to smell of damp and begin to grow a patina of black mould.

Fitted wardrobes on external walls must have backs on them and a free air space between the backs and the walls.  Ideally, the back should be of 18mm thick laminated chipboard or MDF.  Otherwise, what you saved by cutting corners on the wardrobes will be spent on dry cleaning or replacing your precious clothes.