Tag: paint

Purple haze

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There’s this wall that has been the bane of my home and my blog and my mind, I’ve brought it up for at least three years, and at last it’s done.

After painting the tester of Twilight Mist (again, whaaaaat?) on the wall in our bedroom and disregarding the opinion of my husband (spoiler, it turns out alright), I decided to go and buy a full tin and a cheap roller set from Wickes and just do it.  When I say just do it, I meant for Barry to just do it, but that didn’t happen, and it didn’t paint itself, so I did it as it turns out.

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Testing, testing

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This is the wall that just refuses to paint itself.

Paint colour booklets from various DIY shopsFollowing the slathering of a hot pink tester on our bedroom wall, in, ahem, March 2012, we’ve had to look at the crime scene every time we walked in our bedroom door.  It had got to the point where we didn’t see it any more.  And when I did see it one day, I painted over it in white to make it easier to cover when the whole wall was painted.  There was probably a year between these two events.

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Bed: a mini project (stage two)

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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)

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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

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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 →

House valuation

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Barry’s bedtime reading at the moment is looking at houses online.  We’re not planning on moving any time soon (if any of my colleagues are reading this, don’t jump to conclusions!), but it’s nice to look.  He went as far (too far, in my opinion!) as sending an email asking for more information on one particular house, which is quite near to where my mum lives.

The estate agent called and left a voicemail the next morning to say that they’d arranged for an agent from our local office to come and value our house on Saturday at 9.45am.  Very proactive.  A bit too pushy.  But Barry thought, hey, why not?  We were interested in seeing whether the work on the kitchen (in which we sacrificed a downstairs bathroom and hallway for twice the kitchen) would have affected the value.

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Decking day deux

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Decking 6We’re pretty much done with the decking already!  The men started early, about 7.30, and started putting the decking boards onto the frame they’d built the day before.  They also built the path back up so we didn’t fall into a deep, dark hole taking the bin out.  That would have been inconvenient.

The skip that was supposed to arrive between 10am and 12pm came at around 5pm after the gents had already gone home, so they’re coming back on Saturday morning to get rid of the mound of dirt in the back garden.  I did try to shame the man delivering the skip but he just asked us for money.  We didn’t give him it.

Decking 7The landscape guys also built a raised flowerbed at the bottom of the garden, as per Barry’s masterplan, which looks great; we just need to decide what to put in it.

After the mud has been cleared away, we need to get some grass seed stat and dig up those nasty weeds that blight our grass.

Decking 8

We’re also planning on getting a new shed, putting a step in between the two levels for Scarlett’s tiny legs and covering the manhole cover in some way.  Then we would like to put up higher fence panels next to the decking, as we can currently see right over into next door’s garden now, and that’s just not polite.  Then we’re going to stain the decking and fence so everything matches.  I quite like the idea of it being a dark stain, but we’ll have to go shopping and see.

Then we need some nice garden furniture and Barry’s loving the idea of a fire pit.

After that (but way in the future), I’d like to change the paving slabs we have for nice ones instead of the utilitarian grey concrete ones that the house builders put in.  We’ll need almost 40, so it won’t be cheap!

I’ll put up some more photos once the mud mound has disappeared, but I’m really happy with this result!  Just hope we get a summer to go with it…

So, what do you think?  Quick poll: have you ever painted one side of your fence (and not the neighbour’s side)?

Not so picture perfect

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Picture & mirror - beforeI’ve been hard at work turning a couple of old pictures and mirrors into pieces that will match our shiny new nursery.  I don’t want too many different colours going on, so with the pink and grey walls and white furniture, I wanted white frames for anything we put up on the walls.

These two have been hanging around for a while – visitors to our houses from the last 10 years may recognise these; I’m pretty sure they’re both Ikea’s finest.  I already have a white frame for a cross-stitch I’m working on, and I wanted a group of frames like in my inspiration photo that I keep referring to for the nursery.

White mirrorI sanded them both down, stuck masking tape around the edges, and just painted them with the white emulsion we used for our ceilings.  After 3 coats each, they looked quite good, so I started pulling off the masking tape.  The mirror was ok, just needed the edges touching up a little, but the picture had some frosting around the images which came off with the masking tape, leaving an awful edge that I couldn’t do anything about.

problem frame

We tried putting up the mirror in the nursery, but it turned out it looked a bit big and overpowering, especially as we want to put more up around it, so we’ve put that up in the spare room (where it was originally).  I then had a go at painting little pink flowers all around the edge of the picture frame with the tester pot of pink paint to hide the edges.  I’m still not convinced, but it’s up in the room anyway.  I’ll see if it grows on me – Barry likes it, anyway!

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