Since I last posted in early December (I’m just going to breeze past the shame), we’ve obviously had a Christmas tree and decorations up and down, you missed the awesome Christmas bunting and Santa’s sack I made, so I’ll save that for next year.
We’ve also painted over the splodge of hot pink on our bedroom wall because I’m sick of looking at it. Not painted the entire wall, you understand. Just painted over the splodge in off-white it so it’s not as much of an eyesore.
Barry’s bedtime reading at the moment is looking at houses online. We’re not planning on moving any time soon (if any of my colleagues are reading this, don’t jump to conclusions!), but it’s nice to look. He went as far (too far, in my opinion!) as sending an email asking for more information on one particular house, which is quite near to where my mum lives.
The estate agent called and left a voicemail the next morning to say that they’d arranged for an agent from our local office to come and value our house on Saturday at 9.45am. Very proactive. A bit too pushy. But Barry thought, hey, why not? We were interested in seeing whether the work on the kitchen (in which we sacrificed a downstairs bathroom and hallway for twice the kitchen) would have affected the value.
We’ve finally got the polka dot birdie hooks up on the nursery wall, which means we can hang Scarlett’s hearts on there. The birds were really cheap from eBay, but I think they look effective and go with the theme of the room and the wall stickers that are on the other side.
About time too, everything was just gathering dust on her windowsill. We’ve got even more frames that we need to put photos in, but think I’ll wait a bit because we’ve just had quite a few printed.
I may get lambasted for this by the pro-craft crowd, but I’m a bit embarrassed to admit… my name’s Michelle and I like to cross-stitch. Lambasted for the embarrassment, not for the sewing itself. I’m not getting any time to do it at the moment, but I started a baby sampler for Scarlett’s room before she was born and I am going to try my best to finish it soon. Before she’s five. Definitely before she’s ten. Would it be a nice graduation present?
I love doing little bits as gifts for people, I’ve only ever had them gratefully received as I think you can see the time, work and care that goes into them. I’ve sewn cards, bookmarks, and framed pictures, small and large. I’ve made quite a few birth samplers, including one that I started when I was about fourteen or fifteen and took me years to complete. It was around A3 sized and a lot of it was a deep blue – I remember clearly taking care over every stitch. Couldn’t wait to start another colour.
Following my success with the recipe scrapbook, I decided to get cracking with my wedding scrapbook for a bit more cathartic organisation. I started filling it with my wedding ideas from before the day, along with some memory bits like ribbon from the bridesmaids’ dresses, our flight stubs and honeymoon itinerary. We only got married a mere six and a half years ago. I did do a bit when I was pregnant and on maternity leave, but other things soon beckoned (like the SATC boxset, hello Helen!), and it fell by the wayside. I’ve found a renewed energy for wanting these things sorted now, firstly to keep them away from little sticky hands, and secondly to preserve them for when the owner of those little sticky hands becomes interested in mummy and daddy’s wedding and I can show her everything we (or I) did to prepare for it.
To go with our new decking and flowers, we bought some garden furniture so we can fully enjoy these sunny days.
It’s a six-person set, but to squeeze six people round it on the decking, even sideways, would involve someone being very squashed next to the fence and someone at the other end of the table teetering on the edge of falling into the grass. That’s why we’ve decided to have it as a large four-seater, and kept the other two chairs for the patio area by the French doors.
We just need a table to go with them – we’ve kept the old one for now but it’s kind of had its day. You may also notice some odd slabs in this picture, this is because Barry’s taken the slabs across to make the patio area bigger, but now they’re a bit obvious. They’ll weather (I’m reliably being told by Barry, who’s reading over my shoulder)!
The furniture’s a set called Sienna from Homebase, black metal with a purple parasol (hence the purple flowers). We haven’t actually had the parasol up yet, what with the sun being so fickle, but I can assure you, it does look pretty good – we saw it in store.
Check out the photo here for our fabulous dual coloured fence (it hasn’t been finished yet).
I’ve finally got rid of my heinous work of art, and I’ve put up a photo frame that my lovely brother- and sister-in-law got Scarlett when she was born. It’s got 12 photos of her, so I’ll replace them when she’s a year old so that there’s one from each month. It’s a lovely idea!
It’s a bit smaller than the car crash “artwork”, so we’re going to put some little hooks around or under it and hang some hearts on them to use the space a little better.
I found these polka dot bird hooks on eBay and fell in love with them (I’m finding I have more success buying than selling on eBay at the minute), I thought they look very sweet!
I’ve had this hand and footprint done since Scarlett was five weeks old, and it’s just been sat on her windowsill since then – I can’t wait to put it up on the wall!
You may recall that we have an Ikea Expedit unit in our lounge, and back in… ooh, February, erm, 2012, I expressed a desire to pop some little white baskets in those gaps. Those little white baskets cost £15 each, and as we wanted to fill 10 of the holes (the bottom two rows), that’s a hefty trip to Ikea without all the random napkins I pick up on the way round. And the meatballs, of course.
Well, we’ve been forced into buying something for them, mostly because our five month old has just started rolling and I swear she was eyeing up those DVDs.
Our first stop was musicmagpie.co.uk, which is one of those sites that buy your stuff for next to nothing and undoubtedly sell it on for a huge profit. I couldn’t be bothered to eBay all the stuff, with all the Post Office faff and my track record in buyers (I had another one recently with a dress I sold to a person who clearly can’t read), so I downloaded the app onto my phone and zapped the CDs and DVDs with the barcode scanner. That was fun for a bit, but it gets a bit depressing getting £0.21 for your childhood. We’ve also kept really random ones (we couldn’t possibly give everything away), so I couldn’t sell Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill as I clearly remember buying it with my own money, nor could I allow Barry to pimp Con Air. He’s kept Bad Boys I and II (naturally) and Ghostbusters, but wasn’t bothered about any of his CDs.
In the end, we sold 185 items for £61.07. Don’t work out the average, it’s so depressing it’s unreal. The most we got for an item sold was £3.00 for a series of Friends. Sob!
Anyway, off we popped to Ikea, but those eagle eyes among you will have noticed that £60 will not 10 baskets buy. We’ve ended up buying two lovely baskets, and the rest cheap white cloth boxes, a veritable bargain at £2.50 each. I think they’ll get dirty fairly quickly, but they’re a good placeholder for more baskets or drawers later down the line.
Here’s Barry hard at work, planting some flowers. My gardening knowledge is next to zilch, so we went for pretty ones. I was in charge of the selection.
I’ve included a little gallery of the flowers we chose, they’re all white and pinky-purple, because everything we have at the minute is pink and white because of our lovely daughter!
The purples go with the garden furniture I haven’t shown you yet.
The flowers are: Nemesia; Garden Pink “Brilliant Star”; Gerbera; Cockscomb “Caracas” (who comes up with these?); Ornamental Sage. Then there’s the white ones near the middle, either side of the sage, which I have no idea what they’re called. I have a strong feeling they begin with G. Geranium? Gardenia? You tell me!
Edited: Chrysanthemums! They’re chrysanthemums!
I’m a bad, bad blogger. My teeny tiny daughter is taking all my time and my housework and blog are bearing the brunt! Procrastination is key, and the blog is coming first today.
I have a photo from a few weeks ago, when it was still wet, of the garden without the huge mound of dirt. The skip was eventually collected four weeks late.
Since the decking was put in, Barry has stained it, and painted half of the fence; there’s still one side to do. We’ve also dropped the manhole cover and are encouraging grass to grow over it so we don’t have a big, unsightly hole in the garden any more.
It’s amazing how much better the garden looks in the sunshine!
We’ve been using the decking a lot over the last week or so, when temperatures have been nearly 30 degrees, so getting it put in this May was excellent timing (for my maternity leave as well!).
Just getting some flowers for the raised bed, watch this space…