Garden furniture

To go with our new decking and flowers, we bought some garden furniture so we can fully enjoy these sunny days.

Garden furniture

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.

Two chairs

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)!

Garden furniture 1

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).

Kitchen table, ahoy!

Sorry, sorry, I’ve been a dreadful blogger.  The sun comes out and I just abandon it.  I’m a bad, bad person.

It doesn’t help that I’ve just started a thing with work called GCC, where people from companies all over the world take part in a walking challenge.  The idea is that it makes you walk further than you normally would (healthy employees = happy employees), and you’re aiming for at least 10,000 steps a day (about 5 miles).





We’re all getting quite competitive (which is the idea), and to give you some perspective, I did over 26,000 on Sunday, along with Barry, Charlie and Jaime (and Fin was in the buggy, but he technically didn’t do the steps.  He did about 5 when we got back).

Anyway, on Saturday morning, before the walking madness, our kitchen table arrived.  I’m really pleased with it, and it fits neatly into the little bay window we have in the kitchen, although Barry apparently needs a bit more convincing.



We had lunch there on Saturday, and it was almost like eating outside!  I love it!  As a side note, Barry also does not like eating outside, which may be where the problem’s coming in.

Tables and chairs

I’m looking at tables and chairs for the kitchen.  We’ve talked about having stools and having the extra bit of wood as a breakfast bar, but I’m anti-stools in principle.  I don’t enjoy balancing as I eat.  The extra bit of wood has to wait until we get the flooring in anyway, as we need to fix the pipe (that’s just arrived) to the floor to hold it up.

I’ve got my beady eye on these white chairs and matching table from Argos, but Barry prefers the purple, which I don’t think matches.  I also like these ones, which are on offer at the moment, but we’ve just bought the flooring, so I think they’ll have to wait a while.  You can have a look at them with the other stuff on my Pinterest kitchen pinboard.

I am looking forward to having breakfast in our shiny kitchen!

As a side note, you may notice that I’ve added a bunch of buttons on the right to make it easier for people to find and follow me.  Most of them were copied from Karen’s blog (thank you!).

As yet another side note,  I’ve committed us to the raspberry paint I mentioned before on our bedroom wall, although at the moment, it does like someone was shot and killed against it, and then the killer tried to clean it.  It’ll be better when the whole thing’s pink.

The grass is always greener

Actually, the grass is not always greener on the other side because one of our neighbour’s dogs poos freely in their garden so they have giant dead patches of grass. A good reason to get higher fences. But that’s another story.

Barry has had a plan for some time of having decking in the garden. By plan, I don’t mean some vague concept of “we need to do something to the garden”; I mean plan. He’s drawn it out on graph paper so many times I’m surprised he can’t recite our garden’s exact dimensions. I was reluctant to consider decking at first. I’ve seen some examples and it can look very cheap, and it also requires some upkeep (a dirty word in our house), so I didn’t think much to it.

However! My ex-uncle (for an explanation, please see the post where we broke his sander) has lovely decking, which he put in himself and I really like, possibly because he’s stained it dark and surrounded it in pretty flowers.

And yea, I was converted to deckingism.

And yea, I had to google the word “yea” to make sure I was spelling it correctly. It looks a bit too much like “yeah”.

Regardless, let me give you, ahem, the lay of the land of our garden. Our garden slopes towards the back right hand corner. It slopes down to the right, and down to the far end. The patch of land most likely to get any sun at all is the back right corner, which is also where we very cleverly placed our shed. We used to have a rabbit, so there’s a big square patch of dead grass where the hutch was, and I hate the paving stones, which I’d call a “prison” grey. Hence the plan.

I’m not even sure this will get done this year after all the interior fun with the kitchen and living room, but I can tell you what we’re thinking. We’re imagining decking down the right hand side of the garden, and we’ll have to have two or three separate areas (with steps between them), otherwise we’ll end up about five feet above the ground by the end of the garden. Barry’s got visions of firepits and barbecues dancing in his head, but one step at a time, hey?

Updates on Saturday’s activities – it’s (as you can tell by the picture) been snowing, so we’re really in dire need of a radiator now! We’re being quite indecisive about which one to get, so I think some snappy decision-making’s in order. We nipped to Wickes to get some tester paints (not long and we’ll have the complete range) for the kitchen. After Karen commented about brilliant white not being so brilliant for walls, I’ve been wittering on about maybe a pale grey for the kitchen too, but Barry’s having none of it. In retaliation, I’ve painted two different greys on the wall (and in the corner, thanks Karen!) and I’m hoping he’ll come around. God forbid we have to paint it twice.

I’ve also finally finished painting the living room walls, as shown. There are still doors and skirting boards to do, but they’re going to wait until the kitchen’s finished. Meanwhile, Barry was fitting some of the plasterboard we took down into the gaps in the walls, which should hopefully make it a bit warmer as well.



He’s also plugging up the fan that went from the loo to the outside world, but the expanding foam went a bit wrong and it looks like it’s been really ill.




Our dining room table’s currently in pieces, and we’ve moved all of the chairs up to a spare room so they’re out of the way for when the kitchen comes (a week and a half, people!). It does, however, look to the casual observer that we’re ready to play musical chairs at a moment’s notice.