Tag: home

Photo wall… tick!

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Hallelujah, the photo wall is done!  I think it was one of those jobs where the thought of actually doing it was more taxing than the actual action of doing it.  As I mentioned, I have some family coming over today for the bank holiday weekend, so we’ve bitten the bullet and just done it.    I keep walking into the living room and they take me by surprise, as I’m so used to that wall being empty now!

In my humble opinion, I think it looks great!  I sat down on Friday and updated the mock up I’d done in Illustrator, and we used that as a rough guide.  There’s still a few spaces for more photos, so we can add to it if we want to.

So… here it is!  All 24 photos (for now).

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…

Prints

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Prints for the living room wall have now been ordered, all 24 of them!  Got an excellent deal through Quidco for Photobox as well – 30% off + 5% cashback.  Ker-ching!

My brother’s moving house this weekend, so we’re moseying on over to see the new pad.  Don’t know about you, but if we have one thing to do on a weekend at the moment, it means that the rest of the weekend becomes null and void and we don’t want to plan anything else!  Think that means we’re getting old.

It’s also my Nanna and Grandad’s 50th wedding anniversary this weekend, and I’m very excited that I found them some gold dinnerware for a present (don’t worry, they’re not silver surfers!).  I also got a lovely card printed with their wedding photo from Moonpig.  We’re all going out for a meal a week on Saturday with the rest of the family to celebrate.

PS – the new Batman was very good, 4/5, I recommend it!

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.

Pork!

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Barry mistakenly thought he was going to get a mini hog roast for the princely sum of £2.99 recently.  When the leg of a pig arrived (£2.99/kg), we were surprised.  Not as surprised as our fridge, which is usually just full of Diet Coke.

We thought this may be a tad too much eating for two, so Charlie and Jaime came over with Finley again (hint, hint, Charlie, it’s your turn to cook!), and we had the most amazing roast dinner!  I’m not usually one for pork, but this was gorgeous.  I can take no praise for this one – I was at the hairdresser all morning.

He roasted the pork in shallots, garlic, rosemary, thyme (those two from our garden), and put whole apples in to roast with it, which were so delicious (we ate them like apple sauce).

We also had pepper pot cake for pudding (not sure why it’s called that, it’s got apples in it).  I was so full you could have rolled me down a hill and I couldn’t have stopped myself.

We went to see Tenacious D in Manchester last night, they were absolutely fantastic!  Great show.

Also popped some stuff on eBay this week, including our red drawers.  Hopefully they’ll go to a good home (one that will give us lots of money for them, as they’re discontinued!).

To finish, Barry thinks the empty wine bottles in the kitchen look nice.  I think they look a bit like a recycling plant, but there you go.  Anyway, I tarted them up a bit with some sage from the garden.  How pretty!

Negative effect

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We’ve finally sorted out replacing the red drawers in the Ikea unit our TV sits on.  They were the only red item left in the room, and it was really getting on my nerves!

We nipped to Ikea (after the aborted attempt last bank holiday), and I got to try Krispy Kreme for the first time.  It’s amazing, but I digress.

We picked up a few picture frames, and then started doing mental arithmetic, and put them all back again.  We’re going to go in a month or two when we don’t have quite so much going on!  We did also try the shop near to it, HomeSense, which was recommended by a neighbour, but they didn’t have a wide range of white frames, and we’re being quite particular.

They did, however, have an amazing range of mirrors, and we nearly bought a coat peg with different knobs in bright colours (before realising we had nowhere to put it), and a half corkboard/half chalkboard thing for the kitchen (but it was cream, not white).  I’d definitely go back there!

Anyway, we’ve swapped the drawers out, and it looks a bit like a washed out version of the red, like a photo negative!  It works with the room though, doesn’t clash like the red, and will look even better if we ever get these [insert expletive] frames in!

Kitchen table, ahoy!

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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.

Beading… check!

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Barry’s got the beading fitted in the living room.  We think we’re going to just paint the skirting boards in the kitchen, and then maybe seal them, rather than fitting beading, as we’ve put the skirts back on over the flooring (whereas in the living room, they’ve had to go up to the edges).

 

He started by trying to stick them with adhesive, but our walls fool you into thinking that they’re straight.  They’re not.  He’s hammered little tacks in now so that they’re more snug against the skirting boards.

We’ve also brought all of our DVDs and CDs back into the living room.  After having the units empty for so long (since January!), it’s a shock to the eyeballs, and I’m not sure I like it!

We do still need to buy the bits (cupboards/drawers/baskets) for the unit, so that may help the eyeball issue.

Wardrobes

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After all I said I was going to get from my mum’s, we’ve decided not to have the wardrobes in the end.  I think it’s overfacing Barry, who seems to have reached his limit on DIY for the year and is staging some kind of protest.

We really need to get cracking again – at least to finish off the last bits of the kitchen and living room, but going on holiday and eating out (almost) every night isn’t really conducive to pockets full of money to spend on picture frames.

Of our kitchen jobs still to do, we have the following left…

1. Sand and repaint the ceiling

2. Cut skirting boards to size and repaint

3. Fit skirting boards

4. Finish painting the kitchen walls

5. Finish sanding and fit the peninsula

6. Tile the kitchen walls

7. Paint the stairs wall, handrail and ceiling

8. Replace all of the switches with brushed silver ones

9. Get a condenser tumble dryer

The living room list’s not much better…

1. Sand and repaint wall and paint skirting boards

2. Paint the skirting boards and cut and fit the beading

3. Paint the kitchen/living room door (both sides) and the doorframe on the other side

4. Paint a radiator

5. And another one

6. Fit the strip thing between the kitchen and living room

7. Create the photo wall – finalise photos and buy frames and prints

8. Buy white drawers and baskets for the units

 

I need a lie down.

Procrastination

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As you may have suspected from my recent posts, not much DIY/decorating’s being done at the homestead at the moment.  We’re obviously very busy people, and now the bulk of it’s been done, it’s so easy to take our foot off the accelerator and be a little bit lazy.

I’m going to make a concerted effort to keep going this weekend and get a bit more done in the kitchen, like painting the skirting boards.  If we can do some sanding of the kitchen ceiling and get the beading done in the living room, all the better.

I’ve noticed that the living room looks really quite empty with nothing on the walls, so come payday, we’ll hopefully be able to sort that out.  Given time, I’ve completely changed my mind about having the plain frames, and am now looking at mixing them up, like these from Ikea, which is where we’ll probably end up.

I had a look at the cheapie ones from Wilkinson’s and they were all imperfect and the joins had big gaps in them, so if we’re spending so much, and putting so much time into sorting the photos, it’s worth spending a bit more to get it right.  We will have to go to Ikea and see them before we buy them though.  These are from Ikea’s website…