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!

Bored of the Ironing Board...

Good Evening.

Straight to the point.  My ironing board has seen better days.  We bought it when we moved into our first place a couple of years ago, and it was the cheapest in the Argos catalogue.  Oh how times change :-D

The shameful shot:

So, rather that splurge on a whole new board I've been on the hunt for the perfect cover.  Never going to happen.  I certainly didn't find a Brabantia jobbie that would do the trick, and some of the nicer ones would be too big due to the board being so cheap.  The next logical step was to have a peek at Etsy but by the time you add shipping to the UK things get a bit steep.  My budget was ideally around £15, so I decided I''d have a crack at making my own.
I headed to John Lewis, and picked 2 meters of beautiful Tanya Whelan fabric, which was half price and some 4oz flame retardant wadding.  Armed with tutorials I found on Pinterest (Oh dear, I think I'm addicted), I set to work...

Materials ready to go (That tubby chap is my pincushion ^_^)

The Board with the old cover removed and set fire to...

I sort of skipped a step here.  There are two layers of wadding in there, cut the exact size of the board top.  The fabric is good side down, then cut the same shape as the board but with a 4-5in border.

Then I pinned a wide hem around the outside with string in the channel, so I can use this as a drawstring to tighten the cover on the board later.

At the end I left a little gap for the string to hang out so that it can be tied up.  I had planned to tie ribbon to the string a little further down, but the knot that was created was HUGE and made a huge lump in the channel.  I seriously thought that the knot would stop the string from moving in the channel, and thus stop the drawstring action from working.  I had at it with my sewing machine, and removed the pins...

Oooooh...

 Voila!  One shiny new ironing board cover!

Even though I didn't use ribbon in the drawstring, I wanted a cute little tie off, anyway.  Right then, glam, creative bits over-I now have to do the actual ironing.  Sad face.

Double Glimpse!

Good evening internet.  It's been a busy few weeks in the Elliott household.  We decided to overhaul the dining room somewhat, we've been collecting new furniture gradually so we thought it high time to 'finish the job'.  A tin of paint and a trip to Ikea later and we have a dining room that we're happy with.

We've gone for yellow, which isn't something either of us expected, but that seemed to work (took 40 minutes of staring at colour cards at the Dulux machine to figure that out...)

Secondly...

We've had some fun in the bedroom ;-)

We want to change it right up in there as I've had the same country style pine for donkeys years.  We can't afford to change it all out at the moment so we decided to change the headboard on the bed.  This evolved into full-blown reupholstering the whole bed, and I think it's much better.

Before

After

We used the same principle as this guy, only we 'tufted' our headboard afterwards, which was a bit of a pain in the arse, to be honest.  Last job to do is figure out what to do with the legs.  I wan to cover the tops in the wool, but the Mr wants to stain them black.  I guess it comes down to who has the most free time...

Here are some close ups of todays project...

 Looking forward to a good nights sleep tonight!  For now, though, I need to rest my swollen hand, I fired a thousand staples into that thing, and the electric staplegun kept blowing fuses, so I did it with a manual one.  Ouch.

Make Do and Mend...

A bit of a cheeky DIY post today (with poor photography-sorry).  I've had some old blue box files kicking around for a while that I think must have crept home with me from work once upon a time.  I DO use them, but I hide them away because they are pretty awful.  I decided today that I would cover them with a nice paper.  I took a trip to John Lewis and picked up a roll of Orla Kiely Multi Stem wrapping paper, and covered the aforementioned boxes.










Much Better.  We've got a few plans for the dining room this year, meaning that more things are going to be on display.  We got a new table last month-which finally replaces the one from Homebase, and there are a few more things on the To-Do list.  We're going to repaint, get rid of my huge desk and we're finally going to get around to putting up shelves in there.  This means all the files, vases, magazines and who-knows-what-else will be on show.



Unfortunately, John Lewis is a dangerous place, as I instantly fell in love with these Sagaform glasses...

They would look very nice on the new shelves....