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Good bedroom karma

I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. You can more than likely attribute this to some stress caused by the Not-So-Great Break-Up of 2012 (I know, I know, it happened three months and one day ago and I should be getting over it… I’m trying! Almost there, honest) or maybe it’s just the confusion of switching from summer to winter sleeping patterns in Ibiza (trust me, there’s a big difference!). Regardless of the reason, I need to rectify the situation pronto. It’s ruining my life!

Without a good night’s sleep, I find my creativity and productivity dwindles throughout the day, my crankiness levels get cranked up a couple more notches and I generally have no enthusiasm to do anything at all apart from watch endless re-runs of bad/good American teenage dramas. Oh, and Grey’s Anatomy. On top of that, all I want to eat is sugary comfort foods, drink coke, coffee and Red Bull to stay awake and as for exercise! Pffft… Basically, I’m far too tired to exert a muscle.

So I got to thinking (at around 4am, while tossing and turning listlessly in bed), how’s a girl to get to sleep? I asked around (obviously the following morning) and the options just seemed impossible to me.

*Sleeping pills. Errr… ever read Valley of the Dolls? Remember what happened to poor little Judy Garland? More recently, Heath Ledger? No thanks, not for me. I prefer to save such treats for special occasions.
*A hot milky drink.
 First of all, gross. Second of all, I’m trying to lose a few kilos and I don’t think a hot chocolate before bed is going to do my waistline any favours.
*A hot bath.
 Ooh, actually I’d love to but dammit, my apartment doesn’t have a bathtub.
*Get so drunk you just pass out.
 Not very practical when you have a deadline the next day.
*Just get up and write (or watch TV) instead of tossing and turning.
 No.
*Try and read a boring book.
 (Eat.Pray.Love springs to mind.) Sadly, I’ve got an addictive personality and find I can’t even put the most boring book down until I’ve finished.
*Visualisations.
 I also have an overactive imagination and get way too caught up in my visualisations until they become like a movie in my head and I don’t want them to stop!
*Listen to a sleep sound machine.
 Are you serious? I have to ask them to turn the dolphin music OFF when I have a massage as it grates on my nerves too much to relax.
*Count sheep.
 Listen, I have trouble calculating a split bill at a table for two – getting numerical at any time is all too stressful for me.
*Avoid daytime naps.
 I live in Spain. This concept is therefore illegal.
*Exercise throughout the day so you’re exhausted at night.
 I’m so tired I can’t even begin to exercise the thought of exercising – I need some sleep before we get to that stage!
*Try sleeping with someone else…
 Hmmm. Now THIS is an option I would like to explore. After all, it can’t hurt… can it? (THAT is a rhetorical question by the way!)

I returned to my bedroom, looked around and then something dawned on me. You know that oh-so-cliché and oh-so-overused phrase, ‘how can you expect anyone else to love you if first you don’t love yourself?’ Well. How can you expect someone else to sleep in your bedroom if you can’t even sleep in it yourself? [Note: I should have actually realised this before, given the fact I once went out with a guy who had two single beds pushed together as a double for three years and wondered why I didn’t want to have slumber parties at his house! Pot, kettle, too little, too late.]

And as I looked around at my post break-up piles of Disney DVDs (and multiple crappy rom coms), dog-eared stacks of outdated Vogues, an empty red wine bottle (no judgment!), crumpled up Snickers wrappers and scrunched up tissues…

Aaaand the piles of (mainly) pink (or leopard print) clothes, stacks of boots, mismatched earrings and jumbled up beauty products spilling all over every surface, pictures of Ryan Gosling and James Franco (straight outta Cosmo) blu-tacked to the wall… well, I had to have a word to myself. A very stern word. Especially after noticing that all the excess cat fur on the duvet cover and pillowcases (see point 25 in my break-up blog to understand that one) was starting to resemble a Flokati rug.

How could I possibly even entertain the thought of ahem, entertaining, when my bedroom was in a state like this? It was a Feng Shui bloody nightmare – and no wonder I couldn’t sleep with all that chaos surrounding me!

It was time to turn this bomb of a bedroom into a bona fide boudoir…

Here’s what it took: Four hours of de-fluffing every surface with a lint brush; three hours of folding, washing, organising and packing away my clothes; one hour of sweeping, mopping, scrubbing and vacuuming; a set of brand new crisp white sheets and pillowcases (400 thread count Egyptian cotton no less); new soft mood lighting and a collection of pretty candles; magazine racks and a bookcase (because those Vogues will be vintage some day!); a lovely big fluffy rug to cover the chilly concrete floor; boxes to slide under the bed to store the bedding and towels that had been stacked up against the wall collecting dust; a fluffy new blankie for the cats to sleep on; a cabinet for the beauty products (thank the gods of Ibiza for Ikea) and hooks, boxes and containers to contain all my beloved jewellery and accessories. Oh, and some slinky new PJS that don’t have pictures of kittens on them and aren’t made from flannelette (although I have kept those in the back of the cupboard for those hungover days watching TV in bed… alone).

Now. That’s one Saturday of my life I’ll never get back (erm, not to mention all the hours spent online plotting, planning and ordering my new décor)! But I’m sure in terms of bedroom karma, it will come back to me in rewards tenfold. Right?

So after all that… have I been able to sleep in it? Absolutely one hundred percent yes, for eight hours a night and a siesta every afternoon, every day since the transformation. And… yes I know what you’re thinking… could someone else sleep in it?

Oh come on now. You don’t REALLY think I would kiss and tell now do you?