Storage Upgrades

In this post where I rearranged the office into a dining room I mentioned I wanted to get some better looking storage boxes for the shelves under the turtle tank as these ones weren't looking so good

I've been keeping an eye out for some new matching ones and spotted these in the pound shop

The bottom 2 have the turtle food and stuff in one and the leftover office stuff that I thought we might still want easy access to like batteries, envelopes etc in the other. The other 2 are actually still empty but I got 4 because it looked more balanced and it's always good to have spare storage space!

This room's getting there now and looking a bit more finished, they also had a few different table runners in the pound shop so I might change the red out for a white or blue to match the rest of the room a bit better.

Finished Garden!

The garden is the first part of our flat that I'm going to declare finished! Obviously next spring we will probably have to replace some of the plants that don't make it through winter and we will change things around as we go, but right now I can't fit in any more plants without making it cluttered and can't see anything else that I would want to add or change (other than make it larger haha).

Here are some before and afters...

View from the door before

In progress

After

The rest of the garden with the barbecue and bikes...

Before (pretty bare!)

In progress

After

To the right out of the back door and the path up to the landlords garden

Before

In progress

After

The 'in progress' pictures are all from this post back in March when I last shared photos of the garden, we had just planted a load of pots. Since then what's improved (other than the weather in the after pics!) is that the plants have all grown larger, I've bought a load more small pots and 2 larger ones, we've also gained a few more plants. 

I went on a trip over to Gloucester a while back and raided all the pound/99p/bargain shops for garden stuff. I came home with a pretty good loot, small pots from the pound shop, plastic watering globes were in packs of 2 for £1 and do really work (I also have the pretty glass ones from back here), I also picked up plant food, bug spray and a patio cleaning solution (not got round to using that yet). 

Most of the plants are doing really well but some fell pray to slugs and snails like these smaller pots which did have flower seeds in to add in some colour but the shoots were all eaten

So I got some of this tape on a recent trip to the B&M shop in Gloucester, it stops slugs and snails climbing up the pot apparently

I ran out so haven't done all the pots but if it works will go and get some more. 

Also from there I got 2 plastic pots (£1.99 each) one to re-pot some sunflowers into which I'd planted from seeds and were ready to go out, and one for the lavender which is growing like crazy, then I used the pot from that to plant the rose bush I got for my birthday (After planting it I noticed the label actually said that it's an indoor plant, hopefully it'll be ok until winter)

These pillows (£1.99 each) were from the same shop on a previous trip, although they aren't actually outside cushions I bought them with the garden in mind, when the weather's not good they can go on the armchair in the hallway

Some close ups, these guys are all doing really well

Left to right - Lavender, Forsythia, Mint and Parsley, Clematis (It did flower and looked really pretty but I didn't get a photo!) and a random shrub left by the landlords.

The random shrub is actually doing really well and did have a few small flowers, and it's a nice shade of light green and has pretty shaped leaves (anyone have any clue what it is?) 

The edible side is also doing well, the tomato plants (right) are getting big although no fruit yet, the herbs are actually too large for the pot we really need to start using them more! Unfortunately no basil yet but a few shoots are appearing. The pot to the left is spring onions and rocket which is starting to grow up now.

We also now have some sunflowers which are growing fast and a rosebush which may or may not make it as it is not meant to be outside...Those are the pound shop watering globes, not as pretty as the glass ones but £1 for 2 so a lot cheaper, and hopefully once the plants grow in a bit they won't be so visible

As far as budget goes it's a bit of an estimate as a lot of the pots we already owned and some things were gifts but I'd say we spent no more than £100 on the garden this year and no more than £200 in total. 

That breaks down as (per shopping trip):

Blooms Garden Centre - Plants, 2 oblong planters and compost - £60

Pound Shop - small pots, watering globes, plant food, patio cleaner - £15

B&M Gloucester - 2 larger pots, slug and snail tape, compost and pillows - £13

B&Q - Barbecue and bike covers (rough estimate) - £10

Already owned pots, mostly from B&Q and Homebase - About £90 spent if I remember (It was a long time ago but I remember being shocked that a few terracotta pots could cost almost £100)

Gardening in containers is really my kind of gardening, no digging borders or mowing lawns just plant and enjoy! As long as you water them regularly and use a plant feed I find you can't go wrong with plants in pots, we had the same at a previous house and loved it.

The weather was so beautiful over the weekend I couldn't not be out in the garden, although I did get the office finished and it is looking good so a post on the coming up soon!

Freecycle strikes again

Tom was going to pick me up from work Tuesday to go and get the engagement ring resized, and as most times when I have him and the car at my disposal I had some furniture for us to collect...

Also we got some compost and plant pots, garden update coming soon as it's looking pretty good, especially in this beautiful weather :)

I said back in this post that I would like to get a multi purpose table for the office, something we could use as a desk but also to eat at. We do use the desk but only rarely (the printer could live anywhere as it's wireless and most of the stuff in the drawers and shelves of the desk could go somewhere else or go in the bin!) so we really do not need a proper desk just somewhere to sit with the laptop. I would love to have a dining table again as I'm sick of eating every meal on the sofa, don't get me wrong we will still do that sometimes but since we've lived here I've not done a proper Sunday roast as we have nowhere to eat it.

So I've been keeping an eye out for a very specific table - A smallish size rectangular table, large enough for 2 people to eat at, seating 4 would be a bonus. It needed to also have room underneath to store the printer and desk things when we are not using them, so couldn't have a large pedestal or be too narrow.

I didn't see anything that fit the bill in my price range (low haha) and after casually looking for a few months thought I'd put out a wanted ad on freecycle, and I got one!

This is the photo of it set up from the catalogue

Also see the catalogue here, rrp £199 reduced to £99, and we got it for free! The lovely lady who emailed me said they had bought it for extra seating at Christmas and now don't need it any more.

I'm going to sort out and dismantle the desk this weekend and hopefully get this table up in time for roast dinner Sunday :)

DIY Table Decorations

We had our engagement party last weekend at a local pub, it was pretty last minute although as I knew I was going to be away on my birthday I had already planned an informal meal/drinks on the Sunday already with a few people. We just made it more of an 'event' and invited lots of Toms family and friends as well.

I spent most of last week sorting out who was coming, booking the room and sorting menu choice but on Saturday managed to whip up some last minute table decorations.

I have a collection of jars that I keep for things like this (Tom was amazed I finally used them as I've had them ages!) so I thought I'd make 2 types of decoration, one for flowers and one for candles. I went into town on the Friday and picked up my materials

The stuff on the left is all from various pound shops, some organza, ribbon, balloons, mini pegs, paint (I also later got some table confetti and banners). The candles are all from Wilko, the small ones were £1 each, the large ones were £1.70 and the packs of 3 were £1.75.

I started with the painted jars, squeezing the paint into the inside of the jar and moving it around with a foam brush. I had hoped to get them all a light blue colour by mixing the blue and white paint but the first one came out marbled and I liked that better!

I left them all drying upside down to let any excess paint drip out (note: because of the paint being quite thick they take forever to dry and were actually still wet on Sunday when we were using them, so if you're trying similar do them further in advance!) then moved onto the candle decorations. My plan was to wrap the jars in the organza fabric add the ribbon and voilà! The first one I tried sticking down the organza to the jar but it didn't stick very well and I discovered wasn't really needed

These first 2 I also added in another sheet of organza but the finished article was a bit too fussy for my liking and since there were going to candles inside and the material kept going over the top (Fire Hazard!) I kept the rest of them a bit more simple!

I just wrapped the jars in the organza and tied the ribbon around the top and the bottom to secure it and add decoration

At this point I actually wasn't too keen on these bit I figured once they had candles lit and were glowing softly they would look prettier.

I had some ribbon left over so glued some around the top of the painted jars

And here they are in action

My mum very kindly got us the balloon bouquet

I ended up not using most of the candles, only using the small ones from the packs of 3 to put in the jars, as I felt we had enough and there were a lot of people eating so didn't want to crowd the table too much.

I really like the painted jars and have kept them, I added in a plastic cup to each one to put the flowers in. 

The decorations in total including the balloons and banners only cost £23.60 as it was mostly from pound shops!

We had a lovely party, with a meal and then a game of skittles as we had hired the back room with the skittle alley in and an evening of (far to much) drinking! 

I will probably not talk too much about weddings etc on here (we don't even have a date set yet or anything although looking at next year) although any projects like this that could translate to a non-wedding/engagement event or home décor (I'm going to find a home for some of those painted jars in our home) I will share. I'm sure there will be a lot of projects to do for the wedding and some of them will be of interest.

Photobook

I placed an order for this last week and it arrived on Friday

It's a photo book of the last 3 years, I hope to do one per year from now on. I'd seen a lot of them around and saw a post over on young house love how they do one every year, but ones I'd seen here seemed expensive. This 100 page book would have cost just over £100! I got a groupon voucher though so only paid £29, for 100 pages of photos that's a bargain, next time if I'm only doing one year I probably wouldn't need so many pages and will look out for vouchers and offers. It's from photobox, I've also used them before for printing photos and they were pretty quick and good quality.

I started with some old photos and the one on the cover is also from 2009, I went for 2010 as a start point as this is when we got a decent camera, all the photos before 2010 are from phones and disposable cameras so there aren't many and the ones we have aren't great quality. I chose a handful of the best ones for the start of the book.

It was really easy to customise, I liked having some large photos and some smaller photos in different layouts

Or mixing up sizes on different pages

Even the smaller photos came out really well though and it's great to get so many photos on one page when they are silly photos from nights out etc that don't necessarily need a full page to themselves. Also as a tenant it's great having so many photos printed but not needing to find ways to display them in frames when we can't put them on the walls. 

The captions were also easily customised and I could change font, colour, size, placement etc

 I also chose the background colour, and will try and get future ones in the same colour as well

I did discover that 100 pages is actually a lot to fill so I added in some divider pages and some with only 1 or 2 photos on

It's really nice to have the last few years photos in one place and as it's a book it's so much slimmer than having all of those photos in an album and looks a bit more polished. Please excuse the mess on the table in this photo, can you believe we have to start brushing the cats teeth (every day as well!), we are just starting off and getting her used to it so the table is strewn with all the cat tooth cleaning stuff so we can just grab it when she comes up onto the sofa.

I tried to get it in chronological order but after being transferred between a few computers some of the photos had lost their time stamps but from memory I've tried to get them roughly in order!

I've really also tried not to just have holiday photos but also photos of day to day things, parties etc. We took over 600 photos when we went to America last year so it would have been easy for the whole book to just become holiday pictures, but I have a lot of those printed out already and in frames around the flat.

It was difficult though when we went to such a beautiful place!

The hardest part was actually getting the photos together, as I realised we had uneven amounts of photos, like loads of Graces birthday and not many of Olivias! Although Toms sister Becky kindly emailed us a load of pictures. We really just need to take more photos and this year I'm trying to take the camera out and about with me more.

This project also found the end of my patience with our old desktop computer, I had to use it because all of our photos are stored on there but it's so hopelessly out of date that it just couldn't run the photobox website half the time, once I had the photos I wanted loaded onto the site (which took me literally days) I worked on my netbook but every now and then realised I had forgotten one and had to go back through the very lengthy process of trying to upload more. All sat at our very unsuitable desk (You can't get your legs under it and the chair doesn't tuck in so you end up slumped over to reach the keyboard) on our mangled old office chair. So we might be getting a new computer sooner rather than later, if I had my way it would have gone out the window that day!

I think it was worth the stress and the back ache any way as we got hundreds of photos printed for under £30 and the book looks great! I was really impressed with the process of putting it together once I was on a working computer, it really is easy just to drag and drop photos into spaces, choose the layouts and add any captions etc.