Slow progress and baking

Good afternoon all,

Life has been so busy lately.  Things have been busy at work and then I come home and things are busy here too.  One day last week I pulled 11.5 hours at work and them came home to clean my carpets.

Frankly, I live the life of an international movie star.

So, we've made a tiny bit of progress at the in-laws.  We managed some time there yesterday to:

- Remove an inexplicable plank glued, screwed and no-nails'ed to the ceiling
-Replace above with a made-from-scratch ceiling rose
-Painted all walls in the bedroom
-Painted the bedroom door (including the edge...more on that to come!)
-Re hung the wonky 'kitchen' cabinet
-Got a coat of chalkboard paint on said cabinets

All in all, about an 8 hour day there.  On the plus side, we sent the estate agent pictures of the house and asked if they wanted us to paint it back white.  They asked us to leave it as it is, and also put the rent up £20 a month for the next tenants.   We were due to have 3 viewings last Friday, but the first lot took it in a heartbeat, so no more strangers traipsing through the house.  It is already starting to feel like someone elses house, though.  Anyway, you're just here for the pictures.

Depressingly, the colour on the walls IS a different colour to that on the cupboard doors, but in this pic it looks pretty much the same.

Still, this wall was dark grey and now it's dove, and you can just about see the pink on the edge of the door there.  Little touches like this make me happy.

Pink door edge up close.  (FYI the colour is pin-up pink from Crown Vintage, and the walls are our old staple, Chic Shadow Once, by Dulux)

There was so much work involved in getting this ceiling rose up.  The bizarre plank that preceded it pulled up pulled down a bunch of the wallpaper (yes, wallpaper) when we pulled it down, and the no nails had seeped out and turned everything brown.  We managed to a. find some scraps of wallpaper, b. Pattern match them and c. paste them up with wallpaper paste.  I then painted the new paper and a bit of the old white, which highlighted the fact that the ceiling wasn't white after all.  Meanwhile, the Mr set about finding a suitable sized piece of wood and cutting it into a circle and routing a nice pattern into the edges.  Once the ceiling is fully dry we'll screw it up tightly and fill and cover the screwholes.  All the electrical gubbins is on the underside, so there should be no need to take it down again.

And here's the newly-straightened cabinetry (and cameo from the Mr) drying after it's first coat of magnetic chalkboard paint.  Long way to go in there yet... As you can see, the tiles go to the bottom of the cabinets.  This included the one that was lower than the others, so theres a few missing tiles where the cabinet used to be.  Luckily my in-laws never throw ANYTHING away (like wallpaper used to cover a ceiling 15 years ago...) so there are more tiles around.  After chipping off the existing half tiles, the wall is now ready for some new tiles.

And Baking!

I went to a lovely BBQ today and got burned to a crisp despite wearing high factor sunscreen.  I baked a lemon drizzle cake, but didn't have a chance to take any pictures before we left, so I'm afraid the pictures were taken in the car.

Tune in next time for more exciting developments!

Planning a new bathroom

Good afternoon all,

I'm in the midst of planning a bit of a bathroom update.  I recently re-did the main bathroom, but I'm after something a bit edgier.  It's currently powder pink, with white and pale pink towels, an ornate white mirror and a frosted glass medicine cabinet.  As a renter, this is pretty much the only thing I can change.  It's a pretty small room, but I want to go DARK in there.  My thoughts are near black walls and ceiling, and hot pink pops.  Think 'goth flamingo' and you're there.

Over half the bathroom is tiled in plain white square tile, so that should balance it out, and the floor is a 'lovely' black faux marble texture lino affair.

So, here is my current thought process...

I LOVE the octopus figure.  Mr E hates it.  Something tells me I'll win this one.
I'd show you a before picture, but currently the bath is absolutely filled with balloons from my birthday festivities a few days ago.  What?  That's normal, right?

EDIT:  Here are the before pictures.  Who cares that the bath is full of balloons?  I'm not normal so I shan't pretend to be.  So this is pretty much the view from the door (Why are bathrooms impossible to photograph?)

Notice the ledge above the toilet and sink.

 This wall is entirely white tile, so nothing can be changed there, although I guess a medicine cabinet could probably be screwed into the grout.  Probably.

The wall on the left there, and the reflected wall opposite show that it's a pretty, sweet pink at the mo.

I've never liked the light, but I hadn't (until now) had a better idea.  There was a horrid wire cage thing over an incandescent bulb when we moved in.  At least this was an improvement.

And here's the last wall.  That medicine cabinet is WAAAY too small, even though we don't use this as the main bathroom.  You can see the grey floor here too.

So there you have it, watch this space!

Dining Room!

Good Afternoon!

After another weekend with the paintbrushes it seems that the dining room is finally in a sharable state.  I'm still not sure about the yellow, but the Mr loves it.  The grey does soften it a bit (yes, it's the same grey as the lounge and the bedroom).  Anyway, enough of the talking, let's get on to the pictures...

We have the light fixture hanging over the dining room table.  As we live in a rental place, we couldn't be moving the light fixtures, so we rewired the ceiling rose with a nice long bit of flex, and added a hook to the ceiling above the table.  Voila!

All in all, the room feels a little more livable now, but ut's an awkward shape and still doesn't feel quite 'right'.  Watch this space, I suppose!

Finally Finished Bedroom

Good Afternoon.

It's a Bank Holiday Weekend here in Blighty, and according to some ancient law, one MUST do some kind of DIY.  We chose to paint, and finish the much neglected bedroom.  We'd fallen into a trap with the bedroom-the 'no-one will see it but us' trap which meant that other, more public rooms got all the attention, whilst we woke up every morning in a white, bland, hand-me-down furniture and uni house bed kinda way.  Cue obligatory before shot.  Note the dark gray wall (Which I liked for ages, BTW), the country pine bedsides and the bubble glass lamps.  Nice.

So, you saw what we did with our bed, which was to build up the headboard and upholster the whole thing in lovely grey felted wool.  That was a good start.  Then we picked up some really nice bedside tables (Actually they were 'coffee tables' but I don't think anyone minds...).  We also found some old Anglepoise model 90 lamps.  We couldn't find matching ones, so I have a white one and the Mr has the black one.  One day we might buy another one so that they match, but these were free :-).

The Bank Holiday Weekend Paintjob saw us covering over that dark grey wall (and indeed all of the other walls) with Dulux Once in Chic Shadow.  Yes.  This is the same colour as the living room.  I think it's my favorite paint colour now.  The door frames now look nicer, the baseboards look nicer, hell even our furniture looks nicer.  We even managed to put up and old mirror that we got in a charity shop for £3.00.  It  always looked awful against the white, but somehow it just works against the grey.

OK, OK...Here's a pic of the AWFUL chevrons I painted in the wardrobe.  We're going to sand them down, paint over in grey and start again.  Any ideas how I can get them neater?

All in all, the bedroom is so much calmer now.  It was much nicer to wake up this morning :-).  Eventually I's like to swap out the Eames (It's actually one of the dining chairs and needs to go back...) for a Bertoilla Diamond Chair (or something similar...), with a yellow chevron cushion perched on top.  Sigh.

There is no rest for the wicked though, as tomorrow we're planning to paint the hall starts and landing (An onerous task as we have a wall nearly 5 meters tall) in a gorgeous shade of olive green-grey.

Of Country Parks and Crumbles...

Hello there, I've decided to integrate some of my exploits and baking into this blog, and create a well rounded picture of my life :-).  Today we took a trip to Manor Farm Country Park where I saw piglets and lambs and chickens, and even milked a cow.  I went through a victorian school lesson and hand fed a turkey.  We walked for miles, and on the way back to the car we pilfered blackberries from the hedges.

Once home, I decided that a tasty blackberry and apple crumble was in order.  Alas, I wasn't using scrumped apples-I've given up that habit after the Mr. discovered and honest-to-goodness caterpillar in his lunchtime apple...

There's all sorts going on at the moment too!  I painted the en suite bathroom lemon and added lemon and grey chevrons to the inside of the wardrobe (but it kind of sucked).  We're planning on repainting the hall stairs and landing green-grey, the bedroom the same dove grey as the lounge, and adding a touch of grey to the dining room-as well as get a new desk out there!  Busy busy!

See you next time (I may be brave enough to share my rubbish chevrons yet...)

Calm new living room!

Good Afternoon.

As promised, here are the 'After' pictures of the newly painted living room (and kitchen, I suppose).

It feels so much softer and calmer in here now.  I made a trip to the big Swedish box today to get the second lampshade so that they both matched.  This made me happy.