Ikea kitchen: a quick review

Ikea toy kitchen - Duktig - giftNo, we’re not revamping our kitchen just yet!  Our main Christmas present for Scarlett this year (well, last year – happy new year!) was this Ikea kitchen.

We went full circle when we started looking.  She showed an interest in this Duktig in Ikea, so we went home and started researching bigger, fancier (and yes, pinker) kitchens online.  My bookmarks are still full of expensive wooden masterpieces.  But we got a grip.  She’s not even two, she already enjoyed playing with this one, and it does add up with the pots, pans, utensils and food.  This was a fantastic £49 total for the two bits (they split it into the bottom bit and the top bit), not including the accessories.  We did buy it on sale – it’s normally £65 for the two parts. Continue reading

Bed: a mini project (stage two)

Stage one of overhauling our bed was hacking the top off, opening up the lines of our bedroom again and giving me less things to bang my head on in the middle of the night.

Stage two involved sanding as long as I could be bothered (not long), inhaling yellow dust (I know because when I sneezed, it came out of my nose), wiping the sanding dust with a teatowel which really shouldn’t have been used for that purpose, all to get it ready for the paint (which I got on the carpet).  There’s a reason I usually let Barry do all this. Continue reading

Bed: a mini project (stage one)

I mentioned a couple of months ago that I wanted to attack our big yellow Ikea four poster because it was ruining the lines in our room.  For once, we didn’t just talk about it for months and then throw it onto the pile of other discarded ideas,  Although our time and money is stretched at the moment, this was a fairly straightforward project, which Barry really kicked off when I came home to see that he’d already gone ahead and sawed the top off our bed. Continue reading

Plans for bed

Yellow bed 2I have an idea for our bed.  Put those thoughts to one side, this is a house and home blog.

The reason we fell in love with our house was the master bedroom.  And the reason we fell in love with our bedroom is the light that comes from both sides of the house; it fills the space and makes it feel twice as big. Continue reading

Branas, I’ve been expecting you

20130730-125526.jpgYou 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!

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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.

Photo wall… tick!

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).

It’s a frame up

Sorry, sorry, I know, I’m a terrible person.  You would think I would be eager to write my 100th post, but we’ve been doing so little house-wise (read: nothing) that I’ve not been able to admit it.

We seem to have negated this inaction by spending £120 on white frames in Ikea.  Now I know this sounds like a lot of money, but we had almost three quarters of this already from the bits and bobs we put on eBay in the last few months, and the living room is looking so bland without these finishing touches that we thought we’d just bite the bullet.  Plus, it’s near TGI Fridays and we deserve Jack Daniels chicken.  I digress.

We also picked up some white boxes for the units, but decided that £120 was enough for one day and put them back.

For this princely sum, we purchased 24 frames – 4 x A4, 11 x A5 (ish), and 5 x smaller ones (5 x 7″) and 4 x even smaller ones (4 x 6″).  We ended up going for two different styles, Sondrum and Ribba.  24 is less than we were going to have originally, but when we looked at my mock up from March it seemed a bit crowded.

With it being payday next week, we’re going to wait to buy the prints, but they should be around £30 from photobox.co.uk.  As I mentioned way back in January, I’ve turned them all black and white and they should look amazing!  Not sure how we’re going to arrange them yet – looks like it may be a difficult thing to measure.  Watch this space…

Negative effect

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!

Procrastination

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…

Easter weekend

Hope everyone’s stuffed themselves silly over the Easter weekend, I know we have!

Not much DIY done this weekend, only a bit of painting.

We had one of Barry’s brothers and his girlfriend over on Friday, and Barry cooked a lovely meal.  On Saturday I baked (evidence on the right).  No evidence is left at our house, as my mum came over on Sunday with her friend. Yesterday we had a Sunday dinner and my friend Louise came over and we finally met her boyfriend.  Phew!

Somewhere in the middle there, we went to Ikea, only to find, shock horror, it’s actually closed on Easter Sunday!  We consoled ourselves with TGI Fridays and went home.