Friday Inspiration

Happy Easter everyone, I'm looking forward to a long weekend and Tom is actually off on Sunday and Monday as well which is nice to spend some time together. I'm going to the home and garden fair at Gloucester Quays tomorrow with my mum and will share details of anything that catches my eye there. It's on Saturday to Monday at the Gloucester Quays shopping centre and looks quite interesting.

This is what I've found inspiring this week, as usual more on my pinterest.

I would love to have a spot like this in the garden, I can imagine swinging away reading a book here all day!

I have a thing for jars and am constantly hoarding them, so I'm always looking for pretty things to do with them

This desk isn't really what we're looking for in a new desk (I'm actually leaning toward something that can be used to eat at as well as for working) but it's just beautiful

You could just soak away your troubles in that bath

This bedroom looks so serene and calm

Hope you all have a lovely bank holiday weekend, I'm planning to get some quality R&R today and then spend tomorrow at the home and garden fair, then over to Tom's Mum's house for lunch on Sunday and we're thinking of having a day out Monday. So I've got a nice weekend planned, as usual it will probably fly by and we'll be back at work before we know it!

Friday Inspiration

I spend a ridiculous amount of time browsing Pinterest and the internet for inpsiration, so I though I'd round up some of the things I spot each week into a post.

This is exactly what I want our office to look like, from here. I also love the bed in the same post, it would go so well with our new wardrobes which I'll share photos of soon, in fact this is pretty much how I want our whole flat to look.

I would love to have a 'reading nook' somewhere in my house, can't you just imagine spending a few hours here? From here

Or I'd love to recreate something like this in our entrance hall, from here

I'm going to make one of these for all my glasses one day - From here 

I love this white and grey bedroom - From here

This quote is so true :) - From here

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

I'll be reorganising the bathroom and trying to clean up our new (New to us they're actually quite old) wardrobes a little.

xxx

Bread Bin to Spice Rack

Our kitchen is pretty new and lovely, so we aren't planning to do a lot in here other than try and keep our stuff under control and keep it looking tidy. There are less cabinets here than we had at our last house so we need to find storage solutions for a lot of things, like spices. We kept them in a cabinet at our last house but there's no room for them here since all the cabinets are full. I looked around for a while for a spice rack, but most seemed to be wall mouted ones which we can't have, and the counter top ones I did see either didn't hold enough jars to house our collection or I just didn't like them (And as it will be on the counter top I'd have to look at it every day so didn't want to settle for something I didn't like). So one corner of the kitchen looked like this for a while, the spices are all in that carrier bag.

So on the same shopping trip as when I got the ottomans in the last post I bought this:

It's meant to be a mini bread bin 11.99 from The Range (although it wouldn't fit a loaf of bread, maybe only about 4 bread rolls)

We keep the most used ones like salts, pepper, basil, mint and nutmeg on top for easy access.

Then the rest all go inside and are hidden away. The canvas behind is from HomeSense bought a few years ago now, we also have these other two, they were under a tenner each I think.

Much better, although there is still too much out on the counters for my liking so there will be more reorganising to come.

First Upgrade!

The first upgrade we made in the living room was quite small, although it made such a difference in the room.

We bought our old DVD/CD stands for I think £5 each from a friend. However I pictured taller shelves either side of the fireplace for DVDs, CDs and some photo frames or ornaments as soon as I saw this room. Unfortunately we can't put shelves up on the walls, there is a damp proof coating under the plaster that cannot be perforated so we cannot hang anything on the walls below 1.5m. As this is a lower ground floor flat it's more likely to have damp or mould problems so I'm more than happy with these rules, as having had issues with damp/mould before I want to avoid it as much as the landlord and I'm glad they've taken the precaution.

Although I can still see those floor to ceiling shelves in my head, white shelves maybe with built in cabinets at the bottom for storage (something like these), and it is disappointing not to be able have them but that's what being a tenant is about, sometimes adapting your plans to the property not the other way around.

So back to the point, our current DVD shelves were too small and too narrow and we had 3 not 2 so it resulted in this:

Not a great look and it also made for a useless corner that just collected things

We were on the hunt for some taller and wider shelves, but as the skirting boards are very thick the shelves were going to be a few cm away from the walls either side and were never going to fill the whole space and get that built in look I was hoping for.

I thought about buying shelves wide enough to fill the whole space then DIYing a solution to having a narrower base, but this would have made them a bit useless if we moved as they would have been adapted to fit such a specific space and being a tenant it is always good to remember when buying furniture that you may need to use it again in a different property. Personally I don't want to invest too much money or time into something that won't be useable if we move, as eventually we will leave here, even if it's not until we buy our own place.

We wanted bookshelves rather than DVD stands as they're more flexible, we want to keep these for longer than the last ones and if we end up moving or using these in a different room they can store a multitude of things not just DVDs or CDs.

So we ended up going for these

 They are narrower than I planned but it allowed for this

Storing things like the laptop, wii fit board and a guitar down the side of each one meant less clutter in this corner, yay to less clutter!

This also meant a reorganisation where our pictures were, well just an organisation really as there was no thought into it before they were just unpacked and leant againast any spare wall space.

Due to the stereo being on the shelves on the right it meant the extension cord we use to power it, and all of our other entertainment stuff (There are only 2 sockets this side of the room), was exposed, so I put a photo frame over it for now. This is meant to be a temporary solution but I actually like it more than cable tidies!

This is on top of the shelves on the left, a frame of momentos from our holiday to California last year. The sign hung on the shelves was a present from Tom! I wonder what he's trying to tell me...

More holiday pictures (From Yosemite and Furteventura) and some ornaments (turtles and my apprenticeship award) in with the DVDs on the left.

More pictures (Also from Fuerteventura) in the shelves on the right, and as our CD collection expands we can start to use this shelf if needed

Toms guitars, his pride and joy, which used to be on the wall in our previous house (Along with a frame wall, hence why we have so many picture frames scattered around), but now he has on stands.

So that's our first little upgrade. The bookshelves are from The Range and cost £54 each. They're solid pine and are just stained that darker colour, so if the mood struck me I could paint them if I wanted to personalise them a little more or if we moved to a new place and wanted them another colour, I have an ever increasing amount of books so even if we moved and couldn't make them work in the living room for DVDs they would never go unused!

History

So after the tour of our new place I should probably give a brief history of our properties and our current place. I'll go into details on each type of property, our experiences and what I would do differently in future posts.

Tom and I moved into our current flat at the start of December last year. It's a lower ground floor one bedroom in a regency house near the town centre. The landlord lives in the house above and we rent directly from them, the flat is self contained, i.e. we have our own front door, back door, garden and utilities.

Before this our property history is:

1. I first lived with my sister in a 2 bedroom maisonette on the outskirts of the city rented through an estate agent, Tom then moved in and my sister moved out and moved in with her boyfriend (Although there was a crossover time when all 3 of us lived there). Renting via this estate agent was not a good experience for us, I am in no way saying all estate agents are like this but we did not get along with them at all - more on this later.
2. We moved to a small one bedroom house in the suburbs with a garden rented via a private landlord who was very professional and lovely to deal with. This is where we got the turtles, as they stay in the tank at all times unless we are cleaning it most landlords seem to have no issues with them.
3. We rented from a family member, a 2 bedroom bungalow with a garden and garage in another area of the suburbs. Now, I'm not going to describe this place as I don't want to start out on a negative note before this blog even gets any followers, but definately more on the skeletons in this particular closet in a future post(s)! However I'd say what we learnt is that renting from family is the same as borrowing money from family or friends, and the same cautions apply. This is when we got our cats which I admit has restricted us for future properties.
4. In the end we were given our notice to move out and we found our current place and all lived happily ever after so far...