Moving on

by Roz

Firstly, sorry for the lack of posts recently.  Both Bex and I have been a bit pre occupied over the last couple of weeks, for good reasons, but the blog has suffered as a result. Thanks for sticking with us :)

 

This is a bit of a weird post for me to write...it's official our flat, and home for the past 7 years, has gone on the market.  We are finally making plans to move in to our Forever House.  It's all a bit surreal if I'm being honest.

I'm not sure I can find the words to explain what I mean in this post, clearly I've written a fair few posts about the forever house and I knew we would be selling the flat...but it all feels so odd.  Our flat is amazing, it holds so many memories for us, it's safe and predictable and it's just about to be Baby Star's first ever home.  I already know there will be tears when it comes to moving out.

I've never really shared much of out flat on the blog, but given the effort I put in to tidying, de cluttering and cleaning it at 39 weeks pregnant(!) I thought it would be nice to shamelessly share some of the photos with you.  I'm not sure our flat has ever looked so good!

Our flat is an upside down duplex, by that I mean you come through our front door on the bedroom level and have to come downstairs to get to the living room and kitchen.  Our building is one of the oldest in the West End (verified through a painting that was found in the basement of the hotel by the builders) and used to be a large private home before being turned in to The Wickets Hotel (it over looks the West of Scotland Cricket Club) and then further extended when the property was converted to flats.

As we bought off plan, we managed to pick the fixtures and fittings and play about with the internal spec of the flat.  To this day I still love our ultra modern, high gloss kitchen, even though I know the colour scheme is not necessarily a popular choice.  I will be so sad to leave our black mirrored American fridge freezer behind and the glass, glitter brick wall tiles.

I also adore my gallery wall in our dining room.  I started adding items to it after seeing the kitchen wall in my friend Clare's house grow with photos of her life and kids.  The pictures, painting, signs and posters on the wall have been added to and changed around so many times and the latest addition (the Killers LP) was only finally put up last weekend!

Our bedroom is lovely and spacious and has a big en suite.  It's funny looking at these pictures and knowing the plans I have in my head for the Forever House...the flat is quite plain decor wise (lots of magnolia that we never really got around to updating) we did paint a blue feature wall in the second bedroom and paint the hallway yellow but that's it.  In fact we were in B&Q on Saturday bulk buying white Crown emulsion that was on offer - we bought 12 of the 10 litre tubs, having already used up 8 of these tubs!! - and B asked me if we should get some tubs of the magnolia paint, I snorted and said no and he was genuinely a bit shocked.  Apparently he didn't know that the Forever House was going to be painted ALL THE COLOURS!

For the eagle eyed amongst you...that's the thistle bed throw I made at screen printing with Bex all those years ago :)

The photo below is the view from our living room window.  It is so pretty to look out on the cricket pitch all year long.  The space is used for everything from cricket to kids sports camps to outdoor fitness classes.  There is always something going on and I love being nosey!  It really comes in to its own during the summer though as it's a lovely place to sit in the sun, catch some rays and enjoy a cheap pint of cider from the cricket club bar :)

And our back garden is pretty fab too.  It's communal but well landscaped in to separate areas, that means you can always find a wee corner to enjoy a bottle of chilled vino in relative privacy.

I guess all that's left to say is...anyone fancy buying our flat?!  Ha, only joking, we already have viewings lined up from before the flat actually went on the market and whilst I will be delighted if we secure a sale, I will miss living here.  Hope you've enjoyed the wee tour.

Roz xx

 

Home Love at Fashion for Home

I learned about a fab contest at Fashion For Home via the lovely Kimberly at Swoon Worthy so this is my entry.  The idea is to submit a picture of your favourite spot in your home and you could win £500 to spend on your home and it's open to all UK bloggers!  Easy I thought, but then I couldn't actually choose.  I love my home so much!  It was down to the kitchen where we probably spend most of our time as it's lovely and spacious (and you all know I love food) or the study. 

The study won.  It's the one room we designed and executed entirely ourselves.  The kitchen was decorated by Sarah when she lived here and although we've made changes, it wasn't decorated from scratch like the study which went from a horrendously messy magnolia junk room with piles of wedding stuff to the most simple, fresh space we both love to hang out in.

The brief says your spot can be a vignette, a corner or a whole room and to be honest, this fits with all of that.  My favourite corner in the house is definitely the one above!  I LOVE our Hemnes day bed, it's so comfortable, either as a snug corner for me to snuggle up and read on or as a double bed for guests.  It also has GREAT storage in the huge drawers - all of my sewing stuff is in the far end, the middle has beach towels, my tripod and waders and this end contains all of Nik's shoes!  But the thing I love most about this corner and the whole room is the gallery wall of my safari pictures taken on honeymoon.  I love how some of them turned out in black & white but had to include some colour so mixed them up a bit.

I love being able to put my own art on the wall and hubby did a great job of getting them all straight since the hooks on each frame were in different places!  Lots of measuring and maths was required!

I call it the Africa room as we have all our African honeymoon souvenirs in there - the Masai beaded necklace, the malachite elephant and our little African men among other things.

It's really the travel room now as we're still adding to it and we love adding our white dots to our travel map every time we visit somewhere new.

It's the room which also represents us best, Nik loves the minimal, clean lines, grey and white and I love the splashes of colour and little trinkets reminding us of our travels.  It's the perfect compromise and we both love the result.

I was only supposed to choose one picture so I'll send in the 2nd one as it's my favourite, showing my beloved daybed and photographs.

Study Details - more photos

I wanted to share a few more of the photos I took of our study make-over which you may have seen over on Florence Finds.  Below are a few more details and photos of before and after for those of you interested in seeing more.

Here are a few more of the 'before' monstrosity...

Not exactly 'homely'!  More like something you might see on 'Life of Grime', I'm ashamed to even show how bad it was at this stage but in our defence, there had been a lot going on with Nik's graduation a week before our wedding, then the big day and honeymoon followed by starting his job as soon as we returned - things kind of piled up on top of the piles!

And because I know she won't mind me sharing it, this is how my friend Sarah had the room before we bought the flat from her and her husband (and then became really good friends!)...

Much tidier!!

And our after photos...

Multi-coloured painting from the Masai market in Nairobi

We also purchased this Masai beaded necklace so I thought I would incorporate more orange into the room with some sunset pictures.

The mushroom was from Habitat and the heart paper weight a present from a family friend for my 21st birthday.

We bought our little Masai men from the same market as the painting and Masai necklace.  The tealight tree was from Spitalfields market a few years ago but can be found here.  The malachite elephant was bought in Zanzibar before we went on safari.

The chair was a random find in Costco of all places - we'd only gone in to pick up some prints and spotted this ex-display bargain by the tills!  It is a Stuart Jones chair which when we Googled we found for between £300-400.  We paid £83 and we love it!  It ties in perfectly with the white and grey we decided on, even though we bought it months before without knowing where we'd put it.

Drawing of our wedding venue (present from bridesmaid) from NOTHS

Collage of our honeymoon pictures and malachite trinket box from market.

The Flos lamp was another bargain find - this time by Nik's parents so I'm not sure where from.  The very sexy phone was Nik's for years before I met him.  The iMac was his 30th birthday present from me and the cotton ball lights were bought for our Christmas table but I love them so thought I could drape them in here.

The desk is also from Ikea along with the filing cabinet which I'd had for years.  The very cute house letter rack is from Stylish Life.

The candle holders were from Graham & Green who don't seem to stock them any more but you can get them from NOTHS.

We decided to display our large apothecary jars we used at our wedding but have no idea what, if anything, to put in them.  At the moment I think they look a bit bare so any ideas would be gratefully received - not sweets, it's too tempting!  We have toyed with a friend's idea of making a trifle layered effect out of brightly coloured office supplies (paper-clips, rubber bands, etc) in one but Nik is convinced he will delve into it if he needs something and mess it up even if I say it's just for show!  Please help!