Blackboard messages

We have this blackboard by the front door - meant for last minute reminders but rarely used for that purpose.  Boring stuff like 'swimming kit' sit on there for months (ignored).

I thought I'd update it with a little bit of positivity for my gang before they leave the house......with this Oscar Wilde quote.  So true.

And so 3 days on my family have yet to notice it but it is making me feel tremendous each morning ;-)

Oh.....and on a thrifty note this blackboard used to be an Ikea easel that the kids grew out of that we sawed the frame off.  Upcycling and all that.

Budget bathroom makeover - the after (about time too!)

Everyone loves a before and after don't they?  So thought I'd relive the shame of the before picture (still can't get over that loo roll in the middle of the floor - oh the horror!)

So here is the 'after', sorry about the delay.  We had kind of finished this a couple of months back but still needed a few touches like regrouting the floor tiles.  So before I show you more detail, I wanted to remind you this is a budget makeover and I'll put a full break down of our sources and costs at the bottom of how we fared!

To save money we kept the cast iron bath (which we couldn't figure out how to get out of the house anyway!) It scrubbed up well with some Cif and elbow grease (courtesy of The Queen of Clean)

We also designed it so there was a continual tiled shelf along the back which also served to box all that nasty pipework in.

We treated ourselves to a new toilet and sink.  I was desperate for something square and chunky and I spent literally ages searching for these as anything modern seemed hugely expensive.  Good old Ikea and Wickes came to the rescue for these at a reasonable price (£120 for the toilet and £49 for the sink). We also bought the cupboard that went underneath the sink for storage.  Probably sounds silly but it was a financial breakthrough for me that I realised I didn't have to buy everything from the same place!!

The theme, if you can call it that, is white with flashes of fuchsia pink.  I already had this little picture from my Mum (it was a birthday card a couple of years back) and it seemed fitting.  The orchid does have bright pink flowers on when in flower!

The towels tie in too - I have several in pink and lime green, and these stripey beauties from Primark (just £3 each!!)  We have used these towels regularly for about 4 months now and they are good as new - can highly recommend.

A nice extra to the sink was this little soap dish and metal tray.   You can see them better in the product shot below.  They 'sealed the deal' for me and are really useful as an extra place to keep toothbrushes etc.  The mirror with etched flower detail is also from Ikea.

This shot shows the tiled side of the bath (no longer an empty space hurrah!!).  We considered a bath panel but it just seemed cheaper to tile it.  It easily comes off as a separate piece if we need to get behind it.  The little green cork topped stool belonged to my Grandmother.  The bathmat I already had.

There were no labour costs for this project - it was all undertaken by The Queen of Clean over many, many weekends.

So in summary our budget breakdown:-

Item

• £120 Toilet (Fresno by Wickes)        
• £49 Sink (Ikea)                                  
• £30 Storage Unit under sink (Ikea)     
• £15 Mirror (Ikea)   
• £135 Wall Tiles (design is Metro widely available although cannot recall supplier)                   
• £47 Floor Tiles (Wickes)                                                                                                                 
• £150 Taps (Bristan but hugely embarrassed we cannot recall supplier!)                                        
• £35 Towel rail and toilet roll holder                                                                                                 
• £6 2 x new striped towels (Primark)                                                                                                
• 50p Soap dispenser (Car Boot Sale)                                                                                                 
• Artwork and plant (already owned)                                                                                         
• Endless enthusiasm and patience (Free!)

Grand Total  =   £587.50

Okay, so we went over budget.  But considering during my research some items alone e.g taps or sinks cost over £500 I am pretty pleased with what we've achieved.  We had put off tackling this room thinking it had to cost £1000's to sort out a bathroom so horrific, but it is clean and functional now if a little minimalist.  The final touches and trinkets can come later I guess but for now I'm happy.

Crochet - Show and Tell

My crochet course finished last Tuesday evening.  I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and realised there is nothing like someone actually teaching you a skill in person.

Anyway I thought I'd show you the evidence.....above is a crochet flower, well three flowers really that I stitched together.  These were tricky at first - and my first attempt (the white one in the middle) had 6 petals instead of 5.  Not quite sure how that happened.  Not sure what I'll do with this now, it's almost a bit big for a corsage.  I might sew it onto a bag.  Or stick it on a wall - would that be odd?

This is a granny square of sorts.  I went for greys with a bit of jade and fuschia.  I declared it 'edgy' - if crochet can be edgy?  Well if it can be then this is most definitely at the frontier of all things 'edgy'.

This is more of a traditional Granny Square - and will eventually be a cushion cover.  I ran out of expensive Debbie Bliss Aran wool for this (bought under duress when I thought it was a good idea to take 3 children into the wool shop - big mistake).  What I've spent in wool though, I've saved in what will be the backing for this cushion.  A cashmere jumper found at a Jumble sale on Saturday for 20p!  I'm going to use this technique to assemble the cushion.

I promise I'll share my other jumble finds with you later this week when I'm organised enough to photograph.  They still need to be spruced up.  But this little crochet blanket you can see right away, although I now have the skills to make my own (albeit slowly) I had to bring this home with me for 50p.

What do you think of crochet?   I'm wondering if it's mainstream moment has passed?  My colleagues at work don't really get it I think.  I was like a little girl each Wednesday bringing in my items to show and tell.  So now I have 'shown and told' you, tell me the truth, do you get it?

Update on the Taupe room

 

Our Taupe room is finished!   Sorry it's taken an age to get these photos, but I had this brief moment when things seemed remotely tidy so took some snaps.  Above is the dining end of the room which I don't think I have shown you before.  You can see my salvaged white barley twist table there in the foreground.

And here is the view from the other end of the table.  We updated our old lampshades with the ones shown above from Ikea,  it was a strangely satisfying process building those.  A bargain also at £13 each including the light fitting itself.

This is the view from my leather chair with the Love cushion on it...where I can often be found!  Do excuse the sheet hanging over the door - that's how I dry my sheets, not very Martha Stewart eh?  Just pretend it's not there.  Some of the doors in this house are on a diagonal angle including that one above if you are struggling with the perspective.

And here is the shelf in the alcove that The Queen of Clean built, loving how the white frames and light seem to pop out at you now.

So all in all we're pleased, it was good to be a little daring with this.  However curtains are in an issue, the current ones seem to be jarring a little.  I am either going to go for a plain cream or something like this Sanderson pattern below which I love, but seems to be everywhere at the mo....your input is most welcome!

Chalkboard......following the crowd

We jumped on the chalkboard bandwagon this weekend, I'd seen this lovely image on Soulemama's blog and it set me off.  And as the Queen of Clean will tell you, when I have an idea in my head that we could do a quick fix like this...........well it usually has to happen.

So we painted an entire wall in littlest one's room (shown above), and the chimmney breast on Yoyo's room with blackboard paint.  Eldest one is undecided if he wants to follow suit........he's never been one to follow the crowd.  

Littlest one does have his trousers on back to front in the picture above....I did try to convince him throughout the day that he may be more comfortable if he put them on again right way round, but he was having none of it.  He is obviously not as susceptible to my influencing skills as my poor husband.

 

Top tips if you are thinking of painting a chalkboard wall:-

• You do only need one coat of this stuff, it is like thick treacle.  So time wise it is fairly quick to do.
• Use an old brush.  I didn't and the brushes were a pain to clean.  Even now all of our white skirting board is coming out with flecks of grey.  
• Cover your carpets/floors.  Sounds obvious, but usually a speck of paint isn't too much of an issue....in this case it is a nightmare, and 100 x worse if you try to rub in the splodge.
• I can't find the brand we used online, I picked it up from our local hardware shop.  A quick online search shows most brands are around £7-8 per pot which is really reasonable.

Varde love

I'm impatient - I couldn't wait to take this picture even though there wasn't quite enough light.  So here it is, my Ikea Varde shelf.

And hand on heart I didn't buy one new thing to put on it.  I am lusting after a vintage red enamel coffee pot on ebay though.

Needs a bit of a rejig......put the old 'less is more' mantra into practice.

But for the moment, it's good enough.

Do you like?  More pics of kitchen will follow once finished.

Slowly but surely

Progress on our home, most of the time, moves at a snail's pace.  A reluctant snail who is embarrassed to ask for directions.  But now and again, some event will spur us into action.

This weekend we got news that our plumber can squeeze us in this week for our boiler to be replaced.  This is something we've been discussing for a while, and debating whether the new boiler can fit in the existing  purpose built cupboard.  Well our plumber confirmed that this cupboard doesn't meet the right conditions for clearance, access etc and we had to remove it this weekend - along with three wall cupboards.  I'm trying to keep positive about the loss of cupboards and adopt a minimalist mindset.  After all 'Less is More'.

The Queen of Clean, sensing my distress, decided to come to the rescue with his paintbrush.  This duck egg blue (very Cath K) is now on my kitchen walls.  It makes up for the fact I am to have no hot water for 3 days this week.

And to replace the 3 cupboards we have lost, my lovely sister picked one of these up for me today.

Just £25!  Very shoestring I think.  I have been getting styling ideas from the following on flickr, see below:-

Photo by Marie's Shots

Photo by Joyful Lova

Photo by Marianne@Songbird

I cannot wait to dress mine.....although this is a long way off as need to get boiler in, painting finished and finally shelves up.  I'm not one for a colour theme usually, but I'm thinking cream and blue items on the shelves with splashes of red.  Just need to keep my minimalist head on and not go and buy stuff just to put on the shelves!  I wouldn't put it past me........

Twisted Goodness

I think The Queen of Clean dreads me going to a local dump as I am known to bring back these little projects for him to transform.

How could I resist those barley twist table legs though?  And just imagine the books stacking opportunities on the little shelf below.

And all for the princely sum of £0

It shall (eventually) be painted cream and take pride of place next to my fireplace.  Perhaps by Christmas.

To dos

In my attempt to get more organised I must confess I had a small, but necessary stationery splurge.

I bought the notebook above for work (It's A4 so a decent size) and before the end of each day I write my To do's for the next day.  Well that's the idea.  Sometimes it all merges into one endless, never-ending stream of 'To dos'.

Somehow though those cheerful plump Russian Dolls make all of those troublesome To dos more achievable.  Even though they do look rather alarmed.

Also in my splurge was some Lotta Jansdotter stationery.  You know stationery so nice you can't use it?  Well this stuff falls into that category.

 

Just can't bear to use these post it notes - occasionally just get them out of my drawer at work to stroke....and try and impress my work colleagues.

                    And a lovely journal book like the one above - just look at the inside..........

 

So will these things help me in my quest for organisation?  Probably not....but it will have been fun trying.

Everything here available on Amazon. 

Birdwatching

 

 

We really did go birdwatching today....well we tried.  Went armed with borrowed binoculars and bird spotters reference book to a local reservoir.  It was freezing, and so we were tempted into the barn there, to make our own toad houses and get stuck in with some various other crafting stuff on offer.

We have promised ourselves to give it another shot when the weather warms up.

So when we got back home, I remembered these birds made from wood/vintage wall paper that I bought last year from Ladies & Gentlemen.  I thought they might look good on my twig (you may have already seen this as a Jingle Bell tree at Christmas, and a glass heart tree....wait till Easter comes around!).

They are all now perched happily on the playroom shelf.  Not quite as exciting as the real thing....but dare I say it a little prettier?

Another trunk

 

Littlest one's birthday turned into a bit of a Legofest.  You know when you mention to a couple of people that Lego may be a good idea.......and then you jump on the Lego bandwagon yourself?  You get the picture. Oodles of the stuff.

I wanted to show you the treasure chest where we store the Lego.  This trunk came from a photography studio in London where the Queen of Clean used to work a long time ago.  He rescued this trunk from being put in the skip....can you believe anyone would consider throwing such a lovely thing away?  I quizzed him on what this trunk was used for and he replied 'anything and everything', but when pushed admitted lights and cables for location shoots.  It all sounds terribly glam....but I don't think it really was.  I remember him working long, long hours and never having a chance to eat.

But back onto the point in hand.  This trunk has been with us for years and has been used as a side table downstairs.  Since we put wood flooring downstairs, this trunk has been banished upstairs to littlest one's room as we didn't want the metal underneath to scratch the floor.  Actually I'm not worried about scratches at all......but I guess you know who is!

So this box stores lego...mainly The Queen of Clean's old childhood lego.  And the odd stray Barbie leg, a ha .....so that's where they got to! But now, since littlest one's birthday we have lots more to add to the collection.  I'm pondering on being super organised and keeping new/old lego separate....but I think that may cause stress.  Which is always best avoided Chez Whoops-a-daisy.

That is Rose sat on the trunk in the top picture, she is growing just too fast.

And please be assured... this is the last trunk post.  I have no more such containers with long and slightly romantic stories attached to them.

And where is Disneytown?

 Imagine my surprise when this weekend, The Queen of Clean announced he was going to tackle some unscheduled decorating.  Usually these things are negotiated weeks in advance.  I was of course, delighted.

We had months ago bought this map of the world mural for our playroom, but never started the mammoth task of putting it up.  So this weekend we did it (aswell as painting another wall and some shelves, and finishing the skirting board in this room).

I cannot recommend this particular mural - I understand now why it is cheaper than all the others!  It was a complete pain to line up (it consists of 8 pieces) and midway through I had to ply The Queen of Clean with Pinot Grigio to get him to carry on.  The children were so excited and littlest one here kept asking, 'And where is Disneytown?' I tried to explain the various Disney locations (and the cost implications - we'll be camping in the UK again this year) but it was rather lost on him.

There is still much to do in this room - we have got to decide whether to paint the pine bookcases that line two walls of this room (40 shelves in total!) white or leave them as is.  After today I'm leaning towards leaving them......... We also need to build a boxed in piece of skirting to hide the pipes under the radiator, and edit the contents of all the shelves.  So much rubbish.

So for now, here is the little corner where I am sitting right now!  We are going to replace this chair (borrowed from our dining set) with a bentwood vintage chair when I can find one or one of these.

The two shelves above the computer The Queen of Clean built for me after I saw something similar on the Pottery Barn website.  They have a little ledge at the front so you can use them to display pictures with no risk of them falling off.  I found out a couple of weeks after these were built that you can get exactly the same thing from Ikea for about £5!  (so naturally I got some more for my bathroom).  These ones though are a little wider which means I can display vases and toys etc.

As the room is finished I will show you more, but here is this little corner for the moment.

What do you think?

A ramble about a bar stool

I had a good find today outside a charity shop, a little pine table (well that's what I thought it was) for £3.95.  I couldn't resist it - even though I had driven to town in my Ford KA and it was going to be a squeeze to get it in.

We have rejigged our furniture in the lounge and there was nowhere for anyone to rest a cup of tea if they were sat in our leather chair.  Since the sofa collapsed on Christmas Eve this leather chair is really the prime seat in the house, and we had been discussing the need for a side table for a few days.

So I bought it home, very triumphant with my find.  The Queen of Clean (who incidentally was cleaning the kitchen sink at the time) asked me why I had bought a bar stool.  Oh no said I, it's definitely a table.  Well, after much debate and googling the Ikea name stamped on the underneath we established yes, it was indeed a bar stool.

But quite frankly who cares.

 

Here it is before, in all it's ikea rubberwood bar stool glory.  I took exceptionally bad pictures today so the black and white is an attempt to disguise my lack of focus.

 

And here we after 3 coats of white satinwood (could probably do with another tomorrow) and the legs sawn down.

This little table/bar stool has made me very happy this evening.

What I did with all those paper snowflakes.....

 We have had *a lot* of snowflake creating around here, since we found the tutorial mentioned in this post. The scissor action is mainly instigated by Yoyo, but the boys have also had a go (I admit somewhat reluctantly where my eldest is concerned).  This has resulted in their little masterpieces waiting for a purpose.....hence my snowflake wrapping paper!

I am determined not to buy a single roll of paper this year, it is just so expensive for anything remotely nice isn't it? So I'm using brown parcel paper with the kids snowflakes glued on.   A little bit of homemade Christmas goodness. The only thing I've had to buy is the red raffia which was £2 for 3 x 10 metre lengths.  The luggage labels I already had, so feeling rather smug about my frugal wrapping method.

It's not the most stylish presentation, but I'm hoping anyone who receives their parcel will know that snowflake on it was crafted with a whole lot of love.

Festive highs and lows

I'll start with the highs.  My lovely friend in Hamburg sent me these fabric hearts and I just adore them.  I am hanging them on my sash window locks for the moment.  They may make their way onto the tree at a later date....

Onto the lows.  Yoyo had an accident at our town's annual Christmas festival on Friday.  She cut her chin quite badly tripping over a wall and we ended up having to take her to hospital. She was *so* brave and after some glue and butterfly stitches was her old self again. I promised her I would buy her a present as she had missed out on the festival (the accident happened within 20 minutes of arriving there).

So the following day just before we ventured out to choose said present, she handed me this note.

I think I cried.  Now, between you and me I appreciate the motivation behind this note may have been around getting a really good present for being brave.  But she hid that quite well.  I think the combination of the 'fank you', the coloured in heart and the stream of kisses was what bought the tears on.

And on a lighter note......we made these snowflakes today.  I'm going to iron them and stick them on my front bay windows on the bottom panes.  For a great tutorial have a look here.

The Dahlia Man

There has been a lovely view in our town this summer of a sloping garden covered in Dahlias.  Every day I would drive past growing more curious and eventually saw a 'Flowers for Sale' sign some weeks ago.  I kept meaning to stop, as you do but never get round to doing so..... 

But today I did stop, and I am glad I did.  I met the owner of the garden (who incidentally has also taken over both his neighbours gardens with his Dahlia obsession), he is 79 and every year grows thousands of Dahlias to show.  He sells them throughout the summer to passers by.  Tomorrow he is going to chop them all down so he said that I could take any that I liked as long as I cut them myself. 

 

Here are some pictures of his garden - Dahlias as far as the eye can see!  He has invited me to go back in March and he is going to give me some tubers.