Designer Storage

I mentioned a while back that I'd ordered a  Componobili replica from bluesuntree.co.uk for some bathroom storage. Well it arrived last week and I love it! It fits the awkward space between the sink and the bath perfectly and stores everything we need!

The original owners of the house had renovated the bathroom about a year before we bought it so not much really needs doing urgently aside from the massive crack in the tiles on the floor. It's like a bloody fault line. Style wise I'd prefer black and white tiles and a bit more fun going on...but I'm not complaining as what we have should serve us well over the next few years. Plus our shower is the size of a house and is amazing. 

The estate agent's picture below shows it how it looked when we viewed the house. I really wish they'd installed the sink to one side, or at least installed some kind of vanity unit as they clearly had similar storage issues to us and went with the 'shove some storage next to the bath' concept.

Here's how it's looking now. Oh how I long for a wide angle lens. Oh how I long for an actual camera. 

It could do with a bit more art work in there, we currently only have one framed map of the NYC Subway system, which you can't see in this pic. 

It's funny...I don't love the bathroom that much as we haven't really been able to make any drastic changes to it aside from a lick of paint. Like we are the evil foster parents who don't want to invest too much in the bathroom-child as it won't really make much financial sense. 

Impatience

Just bought four of these babies in Sky Blue for the dining room table.

What was the rubbish I was talking about 'waiting and making sure they were what we want'? Christ I'm impatient. We were always going to come back to them though, I know it (ahem).

£207 for four chairs including delivery. Not exactly cheap but I've always loved the original Eames chair so it's a bit of love struck madness.

In other news my sweet friend Camilla told me about Failsworth Mill so we are hoping to head over there tomorrow morning (it's not open on Saturday's FYI) to check out some antique goodness in the shape of a side table for the living room. I was thinking of getting some chairs from there maybe and painting them, but as you can see above I didn't. Is this just me? Am I really that impatient? YES.

An Unintentional Shrine

Our living room fireplace is looking a bit like a rubbish attempt at a shrine to Bob Dylan at the moment.

He's not dead, FYI.

It's an attempt to hide the fire insert that I'm not really a fan of. I need to get a bigger/wider/darker frame and put something that isn't human in it. I also thought about a fire grill instead but I can't find anything big enough or opaque enough to hide this:

Don't get me wrong, it could be a lot worse, it's just not something I would choose and the cast iron/cast iron style insert we'd want to replace it with starts at around £230, so it's not going anywhere for now. Plus it works perfectly well and has a nice gas flame, and open fire is pretty welcome up here in Mancunia. 

I bought a couple more sheets of wrapping paper from Magma yesterday (£1.50 a pop) so will probably be using one of these to replace dear old Bob. 

            

                                                    

Card Art

I did a bit of make-shift art last night.

I had an empty frame that was asking to be used and I remembered I had these Tim Burton playing cards that were a gift a couple of Christmases ago. I've never used them to actually play anything because I ALWAYS end up buying last minute packs of cards for about £75 a pack at the airport en route to a holiday destination. Without fail. I'll never learn. They are some of my most expensive purchases.

Anyway, my Tim Burton cards were sitting around doing nothing so I put them in the frame. Not much more of an explanation needed. I just picked out some of the picture cards for the centre and shimmied around some number cards around the edges. Then I used the age old 'turn Sellotape back to front' trick that our forefathers taught us to stick the cards to the back board and Bob's you uncle.

Is it a bit Emo? I don't know. I like it though. It's sat in our fireplace in the dining room at the moment as we aren't sure where to put it, so it will likely stay there for the foreseeable. 

Dinner Dinner Dinner Bat-Table

So we went ahead and bought a dining table last week and it arrived yesterday. We ended up going with No Name table from John Lewis (as mentioned in this post) because he was on sale down from £299 to £199 with free delivery. (He's no longer available so I can't link to the site which is annoying and ruining my link flow, but here's what he looked like).

So anyway, he arrived and it was exciting. All we had to do was screw the legs on using the spanner they supplied, which broke under my brute force so we finished the job with some pliers. 

Here he is all made up and ready to head out on the town. (Again, worst pictures EVER. Just had lengthy discussion about purchasing a DSLR so hopefully this will drag me out of this pit of despair)

His legs are solid wood and the table is oak laminate, meaning it's real oak on the surface but MDF or some-suchlike underneath. This combo makes it cheaper and lighter. Ideally we would have  real wood table but to be honest they are expensive and we are cheap, so you do the maths. It feels really sturdy and hard wearing, and the oak top is lovely and will also hopefully be sturdy and hard wearing. It's also an extender, in the picture it is indeed extended. Think we will keep it that was as it's not as big as I had envisioned and looks a little lost when un-extended. It will easily sit four to six people, but it turns out our dining room is bigger than I thought.

Clearly we need some chairs. The ones we currently have are from Ikea, one of which I put together the wrong way and it slopes down at a funny angle making you feel like you are constantly on the verge of falling off the seat. Good for your stomach muscles though. I've kind of got my heart set on these Eames Vitra replicas in Sky Blue (four chairs for under £200!) but think we will wait until we have scoured the local antiques and vintage shops to make bloody sure we are getting what we want. Either way there will be no more white. It's starting to feel a bit like an art gallery round ours. 

While I'm here I'm going to kill two birds with one stone and say 'hey look we painted the walls in the dining room!' They are the same colour as we used for the main three walls in the living room, Dulux Professional in Swansdown. It's just enough to give the room a bit of warmth without really being an obvious colour and that's what I love about it. 

We also painted the corner unit that was previously stained wood (surprise) to white (also, surprise!) It's looking nice! I even put out all our nice books that make us look like we are intellectuals and used my lovely owl book ends. Shazam! The pic in the corner is my Valentine's Day card from Ben last year. It says 'You are the David to my Elton'. That's how we roll. 

Rejoice!

I'M SO HAPPY.

Trevor the damp man came over this morning and told me it's not damp. We won't have to have the wall ripped out or re-plastered or anything horrid like that. He thought it was just some small holes in the pointing outside (pointing is the seams in between the bricks of the house where the concrete goes FYI) and he filled them with some putty stuff for FREE.

What a man.

To be honest I thought the pointing was OK, but he showed me that even small holes can let wind and rain get into the brick so it's best to seal it all up nice and tight.

If you live in the Manchester area and need someone to come and check out your walls for damp then Trevor is so your man. He is lovely, friendly and loves Dexter. What's not to love?

Gratuitous and completely irrelevant picture

Hanging

To cheer myself up a bit after yesterday's Damp Gate, I decided it was time to get some more art up on the walls. Putting pictures up was always the first thing I did when moving into rented places. I love how homely it makes a place feel and I've been desperately missing it since we've moved in.

I was given two Stanley Chow prints for my birthday and Christmas and have been saving them for the dining room and living room once they were painted, which they finally are.

Stanley Chow is a brilliant artist & illustrator and he does some amazingly clever portraits of celebs, film stars and sports personalities, but the prints I have mean a little more to me as they are both of Manchester.

Tonight I put up 'Manchester Arndale'. Doesn't sound very glam does it? But it's awesome.

I love the colours and the simple shapes he uses to represent our fair city. 

The second print is called 'Welcome To Manchester'. Ben bought it for me for my birthday and I love it. It's so...cute. I love the dude with the rain clouds welcoming the other dude with open arms. Classic Mancunian hospitality. 

I've yet to put this one up as I'm waiting for our new sofa to arrive as it will be going above it and I want to get the height right. 

Check out Stanley Chow's work on his site!

It's Curtains

The reason we discovered the effing damp in our dining room last night, was because I was about to go and put up our new curtains when I noticed it. Due to the mini meltdown that was had following the damp discovery I've still yet to take ANY pictures of the dining room, with curtains, without curtains, with paint, without paint...you see where I'm going here.

I do, on the other hand, have pictures of the same curtains in the living room. The good old, reliable, non damp living room.

It didn't take too long to decide on what curtains to go for. I mentioned before that I was keen on some Chevron patterned ones. I was imagining grey and white loveliness. But Ben wasn't keen and then we went and got the Chevron rug, so that was kind of off the cards.

I don't know about you, but as far as I can see, full length curtains from anywhere aside from Ikea just seem to be so incredibly expensive! That is unless you want them to be satin, which makes it a bit cheaper...but I'm not a huge fan of satin so really wanted a heavy cotton. Correct me if I'm wrong though and I'm missing a trick somewhere! I'd love to know! There are still more rooms in our house that need curtain-a-fying. Either way it kind of narrowed down the curtain price spectrum a bit.

Anyway, after briefly considering making some curtains from scratch (!!),I took one of many thousands of trips to Ikea to have a look at what they had to offer. It's all well and good searching online but I wanted to feel the material in real life.

And so for £45.99 a pair, Vilmie Linje were purchased.

They look a bit tea-towely in the picture, which is why I wanted to check them out in real life. I thought they might look a bit like those scarves everyone was wearing a while back. (I just Googled that and it turns out the Tea Towel Scarf has its own Facebook hate group).

Anyway it turns out they don't look anything like a tea towel or a scarf. They are lovely and heavy and the stripes are just enough detail to not compete too much with the zillion other patterns we have going on.

You can see them hanging in out living room in the terrible picture I took on on iPhone. I promise I will improve on the picture quality asap. It's shocking.

I can't even do a close up shot for you as iPhone will reject it. Le sigh. 

I hemmed the bottoms with the iron on stuff you get in the packet. It's not too bad you know. I realised the trick is to iron both sides of the curtain to make sure it melts properly and bonds the material together. I hemmed them while they were up on the curtain pole...I think I might have gone a bit renegade but I for me it's the easiest way. I find it means you don't have loads of material getting dusty on the floor and you can check the length as much as you like. Obviously I used a tape measure throughout to keep checking the hem size but you get the picture. 

Hanging wise, Vilmie Linje have a pocket for your curtain pole to go through and also a stip of hooks which you can use with curtain tracks/hooks. 

And that, as they say, is curtains. 

EUGH

Who said owning a house was fun?

Let me shoot them.

We came home today to find the paint we so lovingly applied at the weekend (in the dining room, I was yet to post about it) was starting to peel itself right back off.

You heard it, we have DAMP.

Or should I say more damp, as we'd already tackled a shit load of it as we moved in and thought we had it sorted. Apparently not. Trevor the damp man is coming to investigate on Friday.

I'm sad :(

Blue Sun Tree

Even as website names go this is a pretty obscure one, but bluesuntree.co.uk is well worth having a look at if you want to get some design classic replicas at more affordable prices.

I've no idea how I came across the site originally. I think I was at work a few years back, Googling things for my wish list for a make believe house when I lived in London. This morning I thought I'd have another look to see what they could offer in the shape of Eames replica dining chairs. Turns out they can offer a lot (another post), but I didn't want Ben to have a stroke on finding out I'd just purchased a whole dining set without any input from him, so I've waited (how PATIENT OF ME) and I went a little smaller and got this little guy for our bathroom instead.

He's a replica Componobili and the three door version is £45. Not bad right? Considering he isn't made of wicker and linen like SO MANY bathroom storage units these days are. Seriously! When are they going to get over it and realise that wicker doesn't make for easy drawer sliding? I'd basically given up looking so am so happy to have finally found some bathroom storage I love!

The original Componobili designed by Anna Ferrieri for Kartell is gorgeous and I love it, but it retails at about £86. I know that's not going to break the bank, but when it's going to be used to store deodorants and shower gel in our bathroom I'd rather cut the cost where I can if you know what I mean. 

They have various different versions of this replica Componobili on the Blue Sun Tree site FYI, so you might want to take a look before you head towards the wicker. 

PS This whole post sounds like a big ad for Blue Sun Tree. They have no idea who I am, I just like their site. 

I Love Lamp

Well not lamp, light shade, but I wanted to squeeze an Anchor Man quote in.

Next didn't show the goods when I went to see if I could find this lamp shade so I gave up. We had painting to do and as usual my attention span is on par with a gnat.

Later that day Ben and I headed to B&Q to get some sugar soap for the weekend's painting (on a Friday night I'll have you know, cos that's how we roll) and I dragged him round to the lighting department 'just in case' and low and behold we found a lamp shade that is nothing like I have be obsessing about, but awesome none the less. It's like something from an old Star Trek episode. Sort of.

Behold the Cupola Metal Shade in white. It's big (like half a metre in diameter) And it was cheap. £25.98 to be precise! 

Thank you B&Q.

Before and In Progress - Living Room

BEFORE

IN PROGRESS

Painted Living Room

We finally painted the living room this weekend. I'm still off my face on paint fumes.

I can't find the camera so I had to take some terrible pictures on my iPhone (3g FYI. Oldest iPhone ever. It's terminally ill, poor thing).

The whole process of painting two coats on the walls, priming and glossing the wood and putting everything back together again took about a day and a half. The first day was a bit of a bitch, I'd forgotten quite how boring painting can be once the first coat is in place.

Here's how things look when we started on Saturday morning:

Ben staging a point at nothing in particular. 

And here's how things looked on Saturday evening post two coats on the walls and some primer on the skirting boards, archway and cabinet. 

To be honest you can't really see very much because the pictures are terrible, but here is a little list of things I'd learnt by this point:

1. Dulux Trade Paint is the bollocks. Like, seriously the best thing in the world. I'd drink it if I could. It goes on incredibly smoothly and we could have really gotten away with only one coat, we were just being meticulous. It's so thick and wonderfu,l it is well and truly worth the extra few pounds it costs in comparison to normal Dulux paints. You can buy their Trade paint from any Dulux Decorator Centre and you will love yourself for bothering.

2) You don't need to bother sugar soaping the walls if they have been painted in the last few years. We just ran a cloth around the skirting and coving to get rid of dust and cobwebs. 

3) Use a decent primer if you are painting over varnished wood. The house was basically like the inside of a cuckoo clock when we bought it. Varnished wood from floor to ceiling. We are slowly trying to rectify that and part of that process is painting the skirting boards, the archway and the built in cabinets a nice glossy white. We used Dulux Super Grip Primer, which again is brilliant. You apply one coat, it dries in six hours and then we only needed one coat of Satinwood! Amazing! 

(PS I wasn't perked by Dulux for any of this btw, although I'd like to be. Dulux, Dulux, Dulux.)

4) Eat breakfast before you get started or you will end up in ridiculous argument about how to use a roller. 

Here's the almost finished result:

Still a million things to put back in their place but you get the idea. It feels so much cosier in there already. Very happy. Take two next weekend with the dining room! 

Next up curtains and light shades! Oh the excitement. 

Let There Be Light Shade

I've got a habit of imagining something I wan't, looking for it everywhere and then having a tantrum when I can't find it...them promptly forgetting about it.

I thought that this little dance was going to take place once again when I was looking for a large plain lamp shade for the living room, but I've definitely not forgotten about it.

Seriously though, how hard is it to manufacture a large, plain, drum light shade. Really. I really don't think it's asking for much. We can't be the only people in the world who have high ceilings and a large-ish living room. EVERYWHERE sells those pokey 'basic' multicoloured light shades, they are all tiny and would look lost in a space any bigger than a toilet. WHERE ARE THE BIG ONES?

I got my heart a bit set on this light shade I saw on the blog Young House Love. They modified it slightly by adding a light diffuser, but the size and the drummy-ness is exactly what I am thinking.

After stalking the interwebs for the last few months, I thought I would try a bit of real life shopping and headed down to Barton Square, Manchester's mini homestore heaven. They've got loads of stores there, Dwell, Next Home, M&S Home, Laura Ashley, BHS...the lot. But nada. No shade. I was a bit pissed off. I came back with a serving spoon for God's sake. 

Then today I thought I would give Next one last try on the account that I have a gift card burning a hole in my pocket, so I had another look on their site and would you look at that:

A large (45cm) White String Shade for £38. It's nice. It's not exactly what I was looking for (the glitteryness of the string isn't quite my bag) but I am going to give it a bash none the less in the hope that it's not quite so tranny-glittered in real life. The thing is Next won't let you use a gift card on their site unless you've bought something from them before, which I think is a bit ridic but I'm hoping that if I pop to another branch of Next Home I might find it. 

Fingers crossed, I don't want to have a paddy. 

Back in 2012

Back home in Mancunia from 10 days of cheating on it with various parts of the country.

We have crap loads of paint, about 50 brushes and I've got a bit of a cold, but painting will shortly commence!

Pictures will follow!

Until then I am going to have a bit of a lie down and a take away.

Happy New 2012