Lounge Revamp, And A Letter Written

Today I have mostly been Quite Busy, if that includes time lurking on here and time spent gauging the nation's reaction on twitter to last night's Home is Where The Heart Is programme. Colin and Justin are now the New National Treasures. Alex James, with his own bootcamp-on-the-cheese-farm, apparently is Not.

After that the nagging file of paperwork pertaining to various authorities' interest in my parenting skills needed to be addressed. I whipped off a letter to Chief Meddler our key-worker and requested that they circulate my points to the relevant people in order to update the 13 year old's by-now-very-weighty file.

I followed that one up by deciding at midday I could perhaps get away with a quick snooze on the sofa before 60 Minute Makeover, but changed my mind and stuck to Today's Great Ambition of tarting up the lounge.

Remember this bit of unpainted wall?


 ...umm it had been like that since last year.

 It now looks like this:


But not as dark as this. Its just the room faces north and the lighting was pants by early evening. This is merely for photographic proof that the wall is Now Finished. Its dulux urban obsession, 17 shades lighter than the grey I used 2 years ago.

From the colour proportions being, most-used first, darkest grey, white, black, metallics, and a bit of purple and green, its now going more "washed-out-coastal" - mid-grey, white, cream, metallics, black and purple'n'green.

The room's being lightened up largely because this little baby came home to roost at the weekend, from the boyfriend's office, and she just didn't look right in such a "night-time" room. Besides which, there's no other space in the house for her:

Ex-stock purchase from Royal College of Art, £35, back in the days when I wore red lipstick and got taxis.

And then because the leylines that run through TKMaxx propelled me through the doors yet again on my way home yesterday, I found this beauty:


TKMaxx, £8 from £19.99 because of a tiny scratch. And yes, the shade is leaning but thats because I changed the original dumpy flared shade for this one.

I'm keeping all this though:

Thank you for the encouraging comments re technical tips. Lord knows what's made me now start a twitter account - I'll never work out  how to keep up ;)

An Afternoon In Town

I live in a fairly small town. Where far too many of the locals look like this. I am not local.

Have been out for coffee and some thrifting with the boyfriend (who is not local either). I didn't get round to posting up any pics last time I got a haul, and findings have been scarce the last couple of weeks. So I absolutely had to buy, and immediately show you, this nursery rhyme pillow case.


Humpty Dumpty seems to be depicted as some sort of failed glue-sniffer. Or that could be my cunningly-on-purpose-honestly sideways photo technique. This is definitely going on ebay; perhaps it could be cut up into individual framed scenes, or become a cushion in a "traditional" nursery room.

Obviousy I then started to get a bit pattern-crazy, as I found this "almost retro" gem in poundland.



I've already tried out the marker pen, to remind us to use up the strawberries we got the other day, not because I was writing random Damned cd titles...




And this belt. 75p! Which I'm keeping, in a must-accessorise-more bid to remember to look into a full-length mirror more often before leaving the house.

The Fabulous Colin And Justin were on 60 Minute Makeover today. Cracking shots of them don't you think?

Laziness Saves Me From Untold Embarassment

It doesn't take a lot to persuade me not to leave the house. And the weekend forecast of rain on Sunday was enough persuasion. I did feel restless though - an inexplicable need to buy a pile of clear storage boxes to re-introduce some order and visual sobriety to the junkheap that is my bedroom. There was also the strike-while-the-iron's-hot rationale that goes with buying a black'n'decker dustbuster (the mini-est of mini hoovers!) the day before which had died a pathetic squealing lame death after hoovering up some toast crumbs. I wanted to take it back and get Customer Satisfaction from my broken toy. It was not on! But, people drifted past the windows with brollies and hats, and that rain was obviously not going to relent. So I stayed put, comfy on my lovely dry landraft of a sofa, with some dreadful do-up-yer-house telly. It was that or the Titchfield Thunderbolt...

Yesterday the boyfriend helpfully mentioned that said dustbuster is meant to be charged up before use. I did think the lead was pathetically small and not much use if I was trying to hoover anything on the floor.... Thank f**k for that rain on Sunday or I'd have made a right t*t of myself at the shop.

I have fallen hook, line and sinker back into the netherworld that is soap addiction. Well, just corrie specifically. I do have standards, y'know. I found myself counting the hours during Monday afternoon until the double episode at 7.30... A lot of drama, and a lot of not-great acting and timing of line deliveries. But heck, we lurve it.

To while away the can't-wait-until-8.30 interlude I endured half an hour of a 60 Minute Makeover. A family of 5 in a sterile, spotless, unadorned 4 bedroom house, whose children were not allowed posters on the walls, tellingly revealed that they deemed the bare dining room with 4 photos* on a side table cluttered. Without seeing the end result I can safely say the family, ergo the decision-makers that were Mr and Mrs Clutterfree Clean Freak, would have had a minor meltdown when they came back to orange walls and dodgily painted horizontal stripes throughout the entire house.

* One of the photos was Mrs Clean Freak in her graduation clobber - I just thought what a waste of an education to end up scared of mucking up the house a bit.

Lame Is The Name Of The Game

...oh, t'is a sorry autumn when I feel Brucey puns abounding in my head. Shouldn't my head be full of other, more original, more creative, life-enhancing thoughts??

A sunny Sunday, and I am having the visual joy of watching many, many yellowy-greeny leaved trees wafting about - the view is through my back window, but I am not quite grammatically awake yet to make that any clearer in the space of a sensibly-sized sentence. I feel that I should be leaping about - in the spirit of this autumn joyful brightness - atop a hill somewhere, but my nearest hill, and certainly one where I could guarantee not to be seen by anyone I know, is about 4 miles away. I do not possess the va va voomph for an 8-mile round trip by foot, plus assorted leaping.

I feel the need for something big to happen today, to Get Something Done - like a Big Cupboard Sort-Out, or the equivalent of a 60-Minute Makeover of my kitchen-diner but without the whistles, the screeching, the hideous wallpaper-chosen-by-guest-designer, or the ogling neighbours. I think this Need To Do Something relates to tomorrow being back to getting up at the crack of dawn...ugh. :(

This week has been a lovely, slow, lazy half-term week. The 11 year old and I have been on train journeys to larger, more exciting towns than the one we live in. We discovered a fabulous, derelict grade II listed building and explored a very spiritual 14th century museum on one day, and got hopelessly lost and accused of shoplifting in a charity shop in the 2nd town. Suffice to say please tell your children not to try playing hide'n'seek while mum's perusing the cheeseboards and dodgy nick nacks...

Meanwhile, Strictly seems to have become The Cartwheel Show - will we see Gavin cart-wheelin' next week (that is, if his not-very-good tango was enough to keep him in)? And the I'm Ann Fly Me bit? What was that for? Oh, for fun... I'll try to remember that, instead of thinking of it as some doomed civil engineering manouevre...

Paint, Pizza and Mr Pringle-Head

Tonight at 6.30 we were clutching lovely warm pizza boxes in readiness for some more Claudia-ness. A food-delivery-necessity situation had occurred -  another Slutty Tuesday. Couldn't cook, even though I obviously, desperately, really did want to, as there was not an inch of space on the worktops.

Today's mini post-work siesta, this time right at the tail end of 60 Minute Makeover, left me with option a) snooze some more, or b) Get On With Something. So, resuming the kitchen painting I'd started on Sunday it was. This time I was winging it - still in work clothes. The fact the trousers I wore today are my favourite 5 years old ones, with my charity-shop biba-esque swirly print top, was treading dangerously. But they, and I, escaped unsplattered and unscathed.

Anyhow, there we were, non-functioning kitchen, oven hidden under newspaper, worktops covered in all the 60's coffeepots and jugs I'd moved from the tops of the cupboards. So, v-e-r-y, v-e-r-y dusty...

And then pizza. The Pringle-quiffed one was not on there tonight - obviously only available on Mondays. There were glimpses of eyebrows, and did you see those white shoes - the kind to wear to dance round your handbag? And... at last... a hint of hair-misbehaviour, when there was a strand-lipstick collision situation.

And now we really must go and google Felicity Kendal for some pre-botox'n'lift pics. Or is that really how good that liquid yoghurt is?