Cupboard Shame

Good Evening all,

I've finally been shamed into sorting out the cupboard which serves as a loft in my apartment.  Now, it's important that you know that I am married to a hoarder, and we pulled about 8 boxes of CABLES, myriad broken laptops, access points, projectors and whatnot out of the cupboard.  In all fairness, not a great deal of the 'stuff' in there was mine, but there is a pretty hefty pile heading to charity shops tomorrow.  We also shifted 4 binbags of junk and 3 of recycling.  Yep, there was a place in our house dedicated to storing out of date pizza menus...

Without further ado, I present some pretty shameful before pictures...

It was, as I believe the kids say, a hot mess.

So, after about 8 hours and a trip to the local Staples, it started to look a bit more like this...

Finally, once everything was out and I could hoover, we had the fun of fitting it all back in.  I'd been 'editing' as it all came out, so I was faced with a  MUCH reduced amount of stuff to cram back in.  There were a few 'Tetris' moments, but on the whole it is SO much better!

Hurrah!

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 Great Wardrobe Experiment

Good Evening!

Over the years I've tried and failed so many times to keep my wardrobe in order.  Even living in an amazingly small space didn't kept me in check.  But this time I vowed to try harder, and I think it's working.  Our bedroom has a bizarre nook with a higher ceiling than the rest of the room, and it's in here that we have installed some IKEA Stolmen poles and a small chest of drawers.  For a very long time (Read:Several Years) it looked like this:

Having enough of ironing my clothes both when they went in and when they came out I developed a Plan.  I wrote myself a plan for getting the beast tidy, and some 'rules' for keeping it that way.

Getting Tidy

1.  Sort out the clothes.  I took everything back and followed the old '6 month' rule.  If I haven't worn it in 6 months, it goes.  Yep.  Harsh, but it works.  Now everything in my wardrobe is something I love.

2.  Work out what works.  I find it easier to have stuff hanging, the Mr likes things folded.  Once you figure out where you're likely to put stuff when you finish with it, you can work out where it needs to be in the first place.

3.  Put everything back!

Keeping it That Way

My simple rule is to put things away.  Even if I don't feel like it first thing in the morning, I will fold up my pyjamas and put them in the drawer.  That skirt I want to wear tomorrow?   Back on the hanger, not slung over a chair.  Belts?  Hair accessories?  Necklaces?  They all head into the cute tin pail, and stay there.  

There were a few changes as we figured out what worked...The big box for shoes, and the tin pail for 'stuff'.

It seems to be working so far-and I'm ironing much less. :-)

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.

Lust in the bedroom...

Well, good evening!

At some point in the future we will be looking to change over all of the furniture in the bedroom.  It's my least favorite room in the house.  The furniture I have is good stuff, but not to my grown-up (*ahem*) taste.  I had the furniture bought for me as a young teen, maybe twelve or thirteen, and it's solid pine, country style stuff.  I have been searching for AGES for just the right style.  I think I've found it at Habitat!

(I've cheated a bit, as I already have an Eames RAR, and the lamp and cushion are from John Lewis...)

1.  Original BTC Hector Lamp via John Lewis

2.  Habitat HANA low chest of drawers

3.  John Lewis Geo Cushion

4.  Habitat HANA Bedside Cabinet

5.  Habitat Milton Console Table

6.  Eames Plastic Armchair RAR via The Lollipop Shoppe

7.  Habitat HEDY double bed frame

Enjoy!