Tag: decorate

Still no decorator

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Trying to find a decorator is proving to be more difficult than we first thought.  We gave up on the one that never got back to us, and have moved onto another one.  Unfortunately, as we’re in London this weekend, and then on holiday the week after, the next one we rang is only available on weekends.  Normally perfect, but it means it’s going to be another month before we can get him in to even quote!

In baby news, we’ve ordered the pram now we’ve found out we’re having a girl and bought these beautiful shoes out of crazed excitement.  Got a bit overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in H&M for babies!

Procrastination with good reason

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Oh dear, oh dear.  I haven’t posted in almost a month, and literally nothing’s changed, house-wise.  A lot’s been changing with me, but house-wise it’s exactly the same.

The prints are all safely nestled in their frames, and are waiting patiently on the dining room table to be put up on the wall.  According to Barry, I’m in charge of logistics of how we’re going to arrange them.  That should go well.  The pressure’s on to get them up this weekend, because my Aunty and cousins are coming on Monday for the first time and we want it to look great.

In kitchen news, the great black wall still lies unfinished, and we’re going to cave.  Next door have given us the number of a painter/decorator so we’re going to get a quote.  In the last month, Barry’s moved jobs as well as started his own company, and it’s just not going to happen, so we’d rather get it sorted.  The stairs are going to be a major issue anyway, best leave it to the professionals.

As well as the black wall, I think we’ll get a quote for our room to be painted so it no longer looks like a shooting’s taken place, and (wait for it), we’ll need our third bedroom painting as it looks like that will be the nursery.

Yes, I’m pregnant, up the duff, bun in the oven, knocked up.  14 weeks and 2 days to be precise.  I’ll try not to harp on about it, I know it’s not a baby blog, but my mind has been on other things lately and I’m poring over prams instead of paint like porn in my lunch hour.

We were dithering about which room to make the nursery.  To begin with, the baby can reside in our little nook off our main bedroom, but I think it would be nice to do up a bedroom for when it’s ready to move on and be a bit more independent.  At about 6 months.  Charlie’s giving us lots of good advice, and she thinks that would be good for the daytime anyway, and then the baby can get used to the room.

We initially thought the spare room with the yellow bed, as it’s the nearest to our bedroom. However, Barry’s made the excellent point that it’s nearer the road, and therefore noisier.  They’re both the same size, so I think we’re going to go with the one that’s further back.  We’ll have to get rid of the double bed that’s in there, but I think we’ll get a nice fold-out sofa bed in there for when Barry’s family comes over.

We won’t know what colour we’re going for until around October time (forget team yellow, we want to know!), which is also putting the brakes on which colour and design of pram we want.  For anyone who’s interested, we’re getting an iCandy.  Now I’m going to daydream…

Dreaming of decking

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Despite the terrible weather, we have been talking about decking recently.  We’ve decided it’s not something we can afford to do this year – we’d rather get the house into some semblance of painted perfection first, especially the rooms we use the most, but it doesn’t stop us planning!

Barry has so very much time on his hands, that he’s put the measurements into a fancy schmancy computer programme and come up with an actual plan.

This is what it looks like at the moment (not much!)…

Not a lot going on, and the slabs that we do have are grey and drab and boring.  Now this is the plan for the decking (although it may go to three stages instead of two)…

For those of you interested in such things as elevation, this is below.  This is why we can’t just have one level of decking, because we’d be towering over the neighbours!  Although it might be good to see what they’re having for tea…

And finally!  This is how Barry envisages the finished garden.  I was assured there would be a fire pit in there somewhere as well.  And the slabs can go and be replaced by beautiful ones.  And the sun can come out.

Lovely Jubilee

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Well, I can’t say that I did much for the Jubilee, sadly, but never mind.  I watched part of the boat pageant and learnt a new word: flotilla.  They used it every two minutes until it has eventually become a part of my vocabulary.  We also watched the concert and was very confused – firstly, why didn’t they let Rolf Harris finish his song?  Know your audience!  Secondly, did Stevie Wonder think it was the Queen’s birthday?  I’m surprised nobody had informed him why he was there.  We also watched part of yesterday’s service, but mostly to see what Kate was wearing.

Apart from that, we have done no DIY (surprise, surprise!).  I’m off for the rest of the week, so if I can bear lifting a paintbrush, I may have a look at the skirting boards.  We have attended a first birthday party (happy birthday, Finley!), seen Prometheus (2/5, don’t bother, just watch Alien again, it was better), had pizza TWICE at Pizza Express (eek!), and seen Dirty Dancing (the musical) at the theatre with the girls, which was such a laugh!

I’ve also been awarded the extraordinary honour of being my friend Charlie’s chief bridesmaid, so need to get my thinking cap on for that once they’ve set a date…

A brief history of abodes

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Today marks our fifth wedding anniversary – happy anniversary, honey!

We’ve actually been together more than ten years, since university, when our only source of decoration in the halls was books (his, sciences, mine, languages), posters (his, the tennis player with her bum out, mine, more embarrassingly, the Backstreet Boys) and interesting rugs (his, ratty strips of woven cloth, mine, a fluffy pink heart made of a wandering fibre that ended up on everything I owned).

We then moved to a shared house, where we had the whole top floor which had recently been renovated. Again, we had no power over what it looked like and function and utility reigned over beauty. The only painting Barry did was the bathroom ceiling, in a paint that just wouldn’t stick and turned out to have sand in it for some reason. It all peeled off.

In our third year, he worked in Peterborough while I lived in Spain and France. Spain was your typical apartment with tiled floors and airless rooms (pictured). My entire flat in France was smaller than our current bedroom. In the fourth year, we returned to (fancier) halls, in which I don’t think we even had posters or rugs.


At the end of that year, finally, we rented a house together just outside of the city which had a bit of character. The living room was on the third floor – very topsy turvy! The kitchen worktop had to be oiled regularly – I think Barry’s looking forward to doing that again. The bathroom was a horrendous aquamarine when we moved in, but we asked if we could paint it white and we were allowed.

The first house we bought was another magnolia kingdom. The couple we bought it from had lived in it for a few years and never done anything with it. Ha! we thought. Lazy buggers! We ended up painting this strip in the lounge a purply-chocolate colour, one wall in our bedroom green, a wall in our spare bedroom red, and the bathroom pink. Thus endeth our decorating of the first house.

Our current house is our second, and we nagged Barratt’s to death to get a cheaper price for it. It can be done! All of a sudden, the market will crash, and they won’t be able to give you it fast enough. That’s what happened to us, anyway. We ended up getting it for £25k less than next door, whose house is a mirror image of ours.

We fell in love immediately with the top floor when we saw the show home. It consists of our bedroom, a dressing room/nursery and ensuite. Light streams from opposite sides of the house and it feels huge and airy. The whole of the show home was very black and silver, but it did give us some excellent ideas, even if it’s taking until now to implement them (like black walls up the stairs).

As I’ve mentioned before, we’d love to have built in wardrobes, but they cost an arm and a leg. In fact, I’m not sure my arm and leg would cover the cost.

I was talking to Jules about house blindness (after the carpet discussion), and we’ve decided that once you’ve been in for a while, you just don’t see “it” any more. “It” can be the bland walls you see past, the nail pops you choose to ignore, the hideous (sorry, vintage) carpet you no longer look at. We’d been “planning” to decorate for some time before we actually started this January, but it took a shock this Christmas to actually make us get up and do something, because we needed a project to keep our minds off things.

As my friend Michelle says (and no, I’m not talking about myself in the third person), you always need a project.