We had Jude’s Christening and birthday celebration last month, and every spare minute we had went into preparing the house and garden for our family and friends to come over. Many hadn’t seen it and we’d taken the leap of organising a garden party and just hoping the weather would hold.

In the house, I finally finished painting the downstairs bathroom and discovered I’m not great with heights and paint – it has a heavily sloped ceiling. I went over the paler green side where it was patchy and then painted the lime green side antique white.

Before

After

Pretty pleased with it, and it only took a few hours, so I’m a bit annoyed with myself that I took so long to get round to doing it. Barry also fitted a new radiator as the old one was a bit rusty at the bottom. I was looking at replacing it with a small traditional column radiator, but they’re about fifteen times the price of modern styles, so we’re hanging fire on that one.

The garden was in full bloom, and took loads of cutting back and weeding to make it look presentable. I was pretty fixed on us using this gate at the bottom of the garden as this is the only time I can think that we’ll use the gate to the church, so we had to make sure the path was clear the whole way.

We borrowed next door’s wedding bunting to decorate the garden, lots of teacups and saucers from various sources, and some coloured jars from Jude’s godparents to fill with flowers to decorate the tables from the village hall – it was a community affair!

We got a gazebo at the last minute, which we set up on the (now very ropey) gravel to protect the food, and put wine on ice in the wheelbarrow. Luckily, the weather held – I would have been gutted if we’d had to use the backup plan of the village hall.

We were really happy to see so many of our friends and family in the sunshine, Jude slept the whole event (after the ceremony) away, and I got to run round with my camera, chatting and drinking. As it turned out, it was a pretty perfect celebration.