A Quiz Too Close To Home

DAFT DESIGNS Changing Rooms brought us floating shelves and rag-rolled walls – how many of these dodgy 90’s trends are YOU guilty of?

The Nineties and Noughties series had questionable taste and encouraged a nation of DIY decorators, sometimes with disastrous results.

Siobhan O’Connor asks how many of these popular Changing Rooms hacks you can remember, and which are still lurking in your home?

Sadly, I score highly on the quiz, mostly for the homes in Casinport and Nogglestead. Our home in Old Trees was completely remodeled in 2005-2006 as it was flipped to us, so its knockdown paint job won’t be eligible for nostalgic listicles for another ten years.

So how many of the listed designs have I suffered through?

  • MDF (Medium-Density Fibreboard). C’mon, man, I still have two Sauder printer stands as an end table and an entertainment center, so I’m way into this. Also, most of Nogglestead’s bookshelves are fibreboard of various states of breakdown. I’m pleased to say our expensive furnishings are not; they’re cheap but costly laminates, we’re discovering as the laminate is getting nicked.
  • Boudoir Bedrooms. Well, this includes four poster beds, and one of the costly laminates is a bed that you can configure as a canopy, four poster, or sleigh bed. We’ve generally had it in the canopy configuration, but only rarely with actual fabric.
  • Mirrored Wardrobes. The photo has mirrored doors on the closets, which were a feature on our home in Casinoport.
  • Terracota.
  • Stenciling/Tape.
  • Rag-rolling/Sponging. I ragrolled my home office right before installing my expensive MDF desk in it.
  • Shaggy Sheets.
  • Floating Shelves.

I almost gave myself another bold for the stenciling and tape as Nogglestead has several wallpaper borders which are kind of in line with the thought, but they’re not exactly the same thing, so I used that loophole.

Still, I’m at 50%, with 37.5% occurring here at Nogglestead. I might have mentioned we haven’t upgraded it a whole lot. I suspect we’re going to be those trapped in amber time capsule people whose homes look like they haven’t changed in 40 years. And we won’t have been the ones to have changed it to its last state in the first place.

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