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!

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.

The Befores and the Afters...

Good Afternoon!

Whilst I'm planning the next change (I think it's going to be the bedroom, I'm itching to at least paint in there...) I thought I'd share some before shots of the current place.  When we moved into our current apartment, we had furniture that was cheap, begged, stolen or borrowed.  In the case of our sofa, it was a 2 seater borrowed from my in-laws.  It was so small my husband and I could barely sit on it at the same time.  This wasn't a problem in the old place, as we had 2 and a half rooms.  One room for sleeping and officing, one room for bathrooming (the 'half' room) and one room for everything else.

In our current flat, we found we had so much room that we didn't even use the dining room for a while as we found our feet.  Slowly though (and we have been there a couple of years now) we've got things just right, with a balance of the cosy that we were used to, and the open and airy that we aspired to.  It's interesting too, to see how our style hasn't really 'changed' as such, but has instead become a little more 'refined'.  The walls are essentially the same colours, the same basic shapes in the furniture but just a little more subtle and grown up, although saying that, we do have the biggest sofa in the world and I jump on it sometimes.

Now to think about the bedroom!

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.

Redecorating the living room

Good evening all,

We decided to redecorate the living room, get rid of the one dark grey wall and go for a softer grey all over.  After spending days agonising over the exact shade, hue and intensity of grey (seriously, who knew there so may greys!) we came to a decision and headed off to Homebase to get it mixed.  Obviously we came home with something else.

The colour we chose was called 'night jewels 5' by Dulux, but we picked up a tub of Once in Chic Shadow instead.  What can I say, I'm impatient.  Here's the obligatory 'before' shot...

Most of the walls are white, but the one behind the TV was a dark grey shade called 'Smoulder' by Crown Paints.  It's been that colour for a couple of years now and needed freshening up, so we decided to change it up completely and brighten the room up a bit.  Last night everything went back to 'moving-day white'...

In an homage to Red Dwarf, we changed it from Dowdy old 'Ocean Grey' to crisp new 'Military Grey'...

And here's the completed paintwork!  We're still putting the room back together, so I'll stick up some pictures of the room tomorrow, but for now hopefully this gives an idea of the changes...We've moved some of the prints around too, and the whole room just looks so much less cluttered.

More pictures tomorrow!  

A Few Changes...

There have been a few changes to the blog, and there are probably some more to come.  I've had a few changes myself-so if you'll forgive the self-indulgent nature of this post, I'll fill you in.  I've decided to finally lose my extra weight.  I was about two and a half stone overweight, and I've just about lost the first stone.  Yay me.  I've finally started to feel 'pretty' again, and I've wanted to reflect this in my house, my clothes...everything.  Hence the changes.  I've started to re-decorate some of the house, and I'm super excited to share that with you!
I'm going to find the pictures from the original Estate Agency listing for our house, because even though it's a rental and we've not been able to change anything structurally, it was still a bland white box when we moved in.  I've also been baking more and making cute bento-style lunches for myself and the Mr, so perhaps a few of those will pop up.  Who knows?
Also, I've just ordered a new camera, so no more iPhone pictures!

I've just finished the bathroom.  I painted it whisper pink, and bought a cute print from keep calm gallery that reminds me to look lovely.

I love fresh starts, and I'm starting to feel like a bit of a different person.  I've even turned into a MORNING person, which I have never been in all of my 25 years.  I like this period of change, it's exciting and I wonder where I'll end up?  Hopefully it will be somewhere spectacular and you'll all be there to share it with me!