It's the Little Things

Every now and again I am surprised by the things that make me smile, even when I am having a crappy time of it a little ray of light pops up and makes me think "you know things aren't always so bad".  In this case happiness is a spotty red toilet seat.

I recently broke the loo seat in our bathroom, no i wasnt tap dancing on it, I sat on it in the middle of the night and ooops the seat hinge just snapped.  I can't tell you the hilarity this caused, the other half was highly amused. But serendipity struck, we were going to replace the loo seat with an ordinary white one but as we wandered around Wilkinsons we spotted this wild red toilet seat with white spots, very much in the style of Minnie Mouse, although I won't be wearing Minnie Mouse ears to use it, I am however tempted by the hair bow.

We were however forced to buy a matching mat, toilet roll holder and toothbrush holder.... well, it would have been rude not to really! 

So in the new year there has got to be a revamp of the bathroom, I am thnking white walls (they are blue currently), with white and red lino, hopefully something with really small tiled squares and a new blind in red and white... we will see.

In the meantime everytime I open the door to the smallest room in the house a spotty toilet seat makes me smile... long may that continue.

Home Decorators Secret Weapon

Believe it or not one of the most valuable tools in my home decorating arsenal is....drum roll please!.... Cling Film!  Ordinary food wrap,  I always keep a roll of it in my decorating box, in fact mine is a catering sized roll I use that much of it.

I'm not the fastest painter and decorator in the world, especially when I am trying to work my way around a room that has a a pile of stuff in it I'm lucky if I can get more than a couple of walls done a day, specially if trying to turn a room with a strong paint colour into a lighter colour.  

I find that wrapping rollers and paint trays in cling film between work sessions stops the paint drying out so that the next day I can just rip off the cling film and get on with the work.  I find that the cling film will keep the paint fresh for almost a week, at a stretch... anything longer than that is pushing your luck though and even the most well wrapped roller or brush will go rock hard after a week... but it works well on emulsion or gloss paint as a short term measure.

What's That All About?

What is it about a skip? Obviously when you have work done at your home you generally have to have some way of disposing of all the accumulated crap that gets produced by the job.

When the skip showed up on the first day of the job I have to admit to being a bit surprised by the size of it, I thought to myself there will just not be that much rubbish coming out of this... but now I have worked it out it's quite possible that they don't order a big skip by accident, that maybe just maybe they know what will happen once it's outside your house... that the skip gremlins will sneak along in the dark of the night and chuck their crap into the skip you are paying for!

One night we went to bed and the skip was half empty when we got up in the morning it was full to the brim, we'd inherited someone's broken down washing machine or is it a dryer? Some empty boxes that weren't anything to do with us and assorted other junk dumped by people in the dead of the night.

Why do people do that? Would it kill them to knock on the door and ask? It's not like we bite... well actually I do but only when asked nicely! It just seems so sneaky to me to creep around at night just to dump stuff in someone else's skip, specially when the local dump is a 10 minute drive away.

I was glad when they came and took it away in the end, I would have been mightily pissed off if they had said "sorry we can't take this because it's been over filled."

Dream Office - Part Four

Finally my art room is finished, after several days hard graft painting the walls and the ceiling, it has to be said the ceiling was the worst bit, specially when my husband got a bit of an electric shock from the lights when he took them down to let the ceiling be painted... lesson learned... turn off the electricity even for the simplest of jobs, it's not worth the panic attack. Several days later his fingers were still slightly numb and covered in odd white spots!

I am loving the white walls, I was worried it would look really clinical but the addition of a cream roller blind and touches of colour, like the bright hanging pots on the wall, from Ikea stop the cold feeling and the brightness of the walls really does take advantage of the daylight available in the room, making it a pleasant working environment even late into the evening.

I'm trying to be careful and not rushing to bring every bit of craft stuff I own into the room, it's so tempting but if I do that I will just be surrounded by "stuff" and then it will be too difficult to sort it out. We've put in two white Billy bookcases from Ikea and a sofabed and I can see where I will be putting my filing cabinet, which will one day be modgepodged... it's on the list of "to do's".. once I finish the rest of the house that is!

And I think there is going to be one more bookcase in the room... trust me, every shelf will be filled, I have so many art and craft books it's untrue and I can't wait to unleash my creativity, however that is going to have to wait until the practical stuff gets done... oh the trials of the frustrated crafter!

Dream Office - Part Three

The builders have gone and the art room is done, I had the lino put down and the plaster is thoroughly dried out and waiting for painting, I am planning on bright white paint all over just so that the light bounces around the room. If you are going to be doing lots of work that involves close work light is the most valuable thing you can have.

I've chosen a really pale linoleum for the floor, I wanted something that had the look of wood but obviously laminate flooring and paint doesn't always go well together, specially oil paints, so after weighing up the options I thought linoleum would be the best bet, easily clean, not terribly expensive and easily replaced if it all goes horribly wrong and I drop a pot of paint that can't be wiped up.

On the whole theme of light I chose these eye shaped lights with four separate lights all of which are independantly positionable. All in all that gives eight spots that I can position in different corners of the room or directly onto the work table.

I couldn't believe how difficult it was to choose lights, I knew what I wanted when I went into B&Q but wow the light section was so confusing, every set of lights I liked was either horrendously and unnecessarily expensive or they didn't have them in stock... they had them on the display, twinkling down... but reach into the numbered spot where said lights were supposed to be resting and.... no not there, just an empty space. Very very frustrating.


But now the lights are up on the ceiling I am really pleased with the choice I made and because the room is so well insulated the heat rom the lights actually seems to warm up the room... bonus!

Dream Office - Part Two

I keep calling this an office but it's not really, it's not what will be happening in this space, it's going to be an art room really and a spare bedroom when we have guests, the plan is to put a sofabed in there but mainly it's going to be my sanctuary, why is it when I say the word sanctuary I hear bells in my head... in a cartoony voice?

The walls in the room have been insulated and plasterboarded and the electrics have been run, these will provide the sockets for all my sewing machines and my heat gun in a few days time and the window went in a week ago. Obviously we had our own personal drama going on but the work continued and Danny the builder has been brilliant. Now the window is in the room is incredibly warm even with no heating in there... Mick the gentleman from The Garage Conversion Company, had told us that it would be warm, but boy was he ever not kidding!

The day I saw the window go in was a really good day for me, even in the midst of feeling crappy and sad this was a highlight, knowing we were a step closer to me having my dream space.

From the outside of the house you can see a slight difference in the brickwork but it's so slight and the bricks are so similar to the original brickwork of the house I can already tell that within a very short space of time the bricks will weather in and it will be very hard to tell that the house wasn't built with this extra room already in place the company has been so careful to colour match the bricks and matching the window pattern.

New House - New Start

We moved in to our new house on the 4th December and since then it's been nonstop, I managed to get Pie's office decorated in about 3 days (go me!) although I have to admit it looked a lot better before he chucked, what looks to me, like a load of junk in there... but hey ho, not my room. I did what I set out to do and created a nice workspace for him.

Hopefully it will be my turn soon. Once Christmas is over with hopefully I will be getting the garage converted into a craft room... I can't wait, my own space at last where I can paint and sew and create to my hearts content. However at the moment it just looks like a store room. Boo Hiss!

When we first came and looked at the house we completely ignored the decor, all those things can be changed after all but having moved in and looked around my first thought was... why????

I love colour but I definitely cannot live with bright orange walls and a puce green toilet (no I am not joking)

Doesn't look as orange here as it is on the wall, trust me. It's orange !!!!


This week it has all been about painting, walls rather than dolls or silk, the through lounge is lovely and big and we thought at first we might put the wall back up between the two to give two separate rooms, but having been here for a week we have grown to quite like the sense of space and openness so we're going to leave it the way it is and just have a two tone effect to the painting to show the difference in the rooms.

I'm covering up the orange wordwork with crisp white gloss, I really like the contrast with the new paintwork. It may be a bit old fashioned and usually I quite like a matt finish to my glosswork but on this occasion I think it really calls for a gloss.

I think it gives a really nice contrast against the Sweet Caramel coloured walls.

Dulux Sweet Caramel in Matt

With luck the dining room will be done in time for Christmas, which will be great as we will have a house full of children. So now it's time to unpack lots of boxes and put things on the shelves in the newly painted dining room.

Benjie the rabbit is desperate to help although how he is going to reach any shelves to put things on is beyond me. Still at least he's cute.

Benjie Boobs - decorating assistant

And the old curtains are coming in useful as protection for the carpets during the decorating process.