Nursery wall

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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!

Stool

Nursing stool

Well, the baby hasn’t arrived yet (only a week and a half to go to due date!).  In the meantime, I’ve been finishing off the upholstery side of the rocking stool that came with our nursing chair from my lovely friend Helen.  All it needed was a staple gun!

The edges aren’t the most professional, mostly because I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, but definitely fit for our purposes.

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All we need to do now is wait for the weather to brighten up a bit (more snow due this week, folks!), and then set about painting the wood white – I think it really would make it.

Chair fabrics

Upholstery fabrics

These are the three fabric samples I ordered for the nursing chair.  The bottom one’s very much like the fabric on our sofa at the moment, a slate grey, and the top one doesn’t look as nice in real life as it appears in pictures.  It just so happens (and this never happens!) that I like the cheapest one (the middle one).

It’s supposed to be grey-beige but looks like the platinum one we had our eye on when we went to the upholsterers.  It’s £8.99/m and the eBay seller lives about 5 minutes from my house so I can collect it.  The upholsterers thought we’d need 3.5m of material, so I think I might get 5m, just to be on the safe side.

Looking at the other items this eBay seller has, I’m wondering if I need more supplies.  They seem to have upholstery nails and jute webbing, and I don’t even know what they’re for.  Still awaiting these books from the library, hopefully they can shed some light on it.  I know I need some more foam for the arms, but I think the other cushions are fine.

My friend Charlie’s an angel and has already brought her sewing machine around for me to use once we’ve got the fabric sorted.  It’ll be a bit trial and error though because none of us can remember how to use a sewing machine.  It’ll be better than the Singer though as it has a foot pedal so there’s a real chance I might be able to sew in a somewhat straight line this time.

Nursery done!

Nursery

The nursery’s now been painted, hurrah!  In the end we went for Sorbet (Dulux) on two walls, which is a pale pink, and then B&Q’s Grey Hints for the rest of the room.  When the decorator was painting the grey, I was worried it wasn’t quite grey enough and it would just look dirty white, but it seems to have dried really nicely and they’re good contrasting colours.

We’d quite like to put a shelf or two up (especially as we have nothing to put the baby monitor and temperature egg thing on), so we’re on the look out for reasonable shelving, although I could always paint a pine one white I suppose.

Nursery paint

It’s really satisfying to have the room painted – the furniture is all finally where we want it now, so we’re just waiting for the arrival to really complete the room!

I’m expecting a few fabric samples from eBay for the nursing chair and stool and then I’ll have a go at reupholstering that – my lovely friend Charlie is going to lend me her sewing machine (thank you!).  And if it turns out like a dog’s dinner, I’ll put a throw on it.  Nobody need ever know…

Pinks and greys

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We’ve been trying out colours for the nursery in line with the inspiring photo I found and mentioned in this post a little while ago.

This is as far as we’ve got, but I still think the greys are a bit dark, so I think we need to shop around for a paler grey because I don’t want the nursery to be oppressive!

For the pink, we’re sticking with the “Sorbet” from Dulux that my friend Michelle suggested (thank you!), so it really needs to go with that.

We’ve got the decorator in this week to paint the nursery and middle floor hallway (the hallway won’t be very exciting – we’re covering magnolia paint with “Almond White”, but it’ll freshen it up), so we need to decide quickly.

Bedding

We also got some new bedding for our bedroom now we’ve moved the beds around, finally got a King Size quilt!  It’s so soft – if I had loads of money I would just have new bedding on my bed all the time!  It’s pink and stripy, and the alternative set we got is white with a cute little ditsy pattern, I’ll put a little photo up when I change the bed and remember to take a photo.

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.

Which is best, tiles or wooden flooring? Only one way to find out…

We’d decided on slate tiles in the kitchen before we’d even thought about getting a new one, never mind knocking down walls and making it bigger.  However, I’m not sure about whether they would go with the units we’ve now chosen, so I’m still wavering.  We’d settled on these ones from Wickes, which were on sale when we first saw them, but now the square footage is getting bigger and they’ve come off sale, they’re looking more and more expensive.  I think we’d have to shop around before making a decision anyway.

Another option is to take the white wooden laminate (discussed previously) from the living room right through to cover the whole ground floor.  However, I’ve been strongly advised by colleagues not to have wood in the kitchen – one leak and it’s all over.  Anyone wishing to share their experiences is welcome to do so!

This is the flooring we have at the moment – bog standard laminate.

One factor affecting the choice of a black/grey tile is the colour we’re going to paint the kitchen.  At the moment, we’re thinking brilliant white on all walls, as colours may clash with the units and they’re enough of a statement on their own.  However, in the show house we visited before we bought our house, they had matt black painted up the stairs on both floors.  It sounds a bit gothic and depressing, but it really worked (honest!), so I think we may do the same.

Now that we’ve opened up the stairs to the kitchen, we could carry that black wall down so that one kitchen wall is black (the wall in the image above).  I’m wavering, because I think very dark grey would work as well, like this Slate (left) from Wickes, but Barry’s set on black.  I bought a tester pot of Dulux Midnight Kiss (below), and painted a splodge on the wall (and a bit on the carpet for good measure).

Either colour would also match the potential slate flooring.  I think some hard decision-making is in order, but we’re committed to painting it in some way to cover up the black!

To counteract the darkness of the floor and the wall, Barry thinks that brilliant white on the ceiling and all other walls is the way to go, but I don’t know if it will be too much with the white high gloss cabinets…any thoughts?

On a completely separate issue, I have to have a mini-rant about the plastering in our house.  Where we’ve removed walls, there are obviously big vertical holes, about three inches apart.  However, in two places, the plaster on either side of the hole won’t meet with a flat, straight line of plaster because one side comes out further than the other.  On one of them, the walls are about perfect at the top, but it comes out about an inch further at the bottom.  These things are hard to explain, but it’s infuriating, and it’s going to be a problem in particular for one of them, because we’re putting the kitchen cabinets in front of it.  At the moment, we’re wondering whether the worktop and upstand can be cut in a curve to accommodate it, but we’ll have to see when they arrive.  Rant over.

Shades of grey

It’s difficult when we haven’t finished the living room, but are trying to get cracking with the kitchen as we’re under a bit of pressure as they’ve delivered the oven yesterday and are trying to deliver the units in two weeks.  We still have ideas that we’re working on in the meantime for the living room, but they’re having to go on the back burner for a little while.

One idea we had was of having lots of photos across the green wall in the living room, under the spotlights.  We liked the thought of having loads of images of friends and family, although I initially thought more order would be better.  I’ve since been convinced that orientation and size doesn’t matter.  I will put my foot down and say I want all the same frames though, to stop it looking too unruly.  White wooden ones!

This idea then developed into a black and white theme. As white wood complements our new décor, I started thinking about how the photos would look inside the frames.  I’ve spent my lunchtimes at work using Illustrator to turn colour images greyscale and I now have 37 to print!  The selection may require some editing down and we’d need to decide which ones we wanted larger than others.

I didn’t want to put someone’s image up without asking, so this is one of me taken in the Maldives on our honeymoon five years ago.  Not all of them are quite as artsy, but it gives you a feel for how it will look.

If anyone has any suggestions where one may procure dozens of reasonable wall frames, ranging from A4 down to standard photo sizes, please let me know!  I’m willing to paint them, but I would like them all to look the same style.

Paint, glorious paint

Around the lights we’d chosen, as I mentioned previously, we thought we’d go for a classic feel in the living room. We chose this beautiful green quite quickly (Wickes’ Boudoir), and after slathering the wall with three shades of grey from tester pots, chose the palest (Nickel). The green is a chalky flat matt, which works really well – it makes it look quite grown up!

We discussed, Googled, and then discussed some more which wall we should make the feature wall and how to ensure the room wasn’t too dark with having vast expanses of grey walls. We’ve counteracted this by choosing a pale grey, sorting lots of lighting, and we’ve decided to go for a white wood laminate floor rather than the dark wood we’d originally wanted.

The ceiling was painted last Saturday by the husband. Painting a white ceiling white is the most unsatisfying feeling ever (or so he tells me); you can barely see where you’ve painted. I spent my time feeding him and wandering round looking at the ceiling, pointing out bits he’d missed. And then got shouted at for “making it up”. I wasn’t.