Share your space with IKEA

IKEA is encouraging us to share our spaces. I saw this new feature from IKEA on Making it Lovely yesterday and thought it was a great idea. 

The purpose of the new site called Share Space, is for people to post photos from their houses that show how products from IKEA fit into their homes. I love having a nosey around other people's homes, so this aspect of their website is perfect for me.

Image from here.

Once I've finished writing this post, I'll be posting some of my own pictures onto Share Space, so why not take a look to see what I've put up on there. 

The final big push . . .

I'm nearly there - over the last few months (!) I've been gradually getting my living room and dining room painted. Now I've only got one wall left to go, but it's this one:

I've left this wall until last deliberately, as it's just going to take ages to move everything out of the way so I can actually start painting. As you can see, I still haven't fixed the top alcove shelf on the right of the picture, but I figured I might as well leave it until I've actually painted that part of the wall.

The cocktail cabinet to the left of the picture will need to be emptied and moved before I can tackle that area. This is going to be quite a job in itself as although there's not much alcohol in it at the moment, it is full of glasses. We're currently selling the books on top of the cabinet on Ebay, so they're hopefully only temporarily there, but the books on the shelves are going to take ages to take down and put back up.

Perhaps if I stopped rambling about how long it's going to take, and actually got on with it, the room would be finished!

And so to bed . . .

Well . . . he's in bed, people. 

Torin's mattress was delivered today - apologies if you follow me on Twitter - I've just read that I said the mattress would be here on Wednesday (baby brain again?).

Here's what his bed looks like complete with mattress and duvet:

I have to apologise now for the duvet cover - very 90s, I know. It was in fact mine when I was about 14! I haven't found a reasonably priced one that I like for Torin's room yet (look out HomeSense here I come!), so in the meantime we're making do with this one. I'm sure Torin won't mind!

Anyway, his mattress was delivered this afternoon and he was actually screaming with excitement when David took it upstairs and they ripped the plastic off it together. He then spent a good few minutes bouncing on the bed on his knees, head-butting the mattress. I did think that this was perhaps a good sign - he obviously liked his new bed and would therefore perhaps want to sleep in it. Another part of me thought uh-oh, he sees this new bed as a play thing - will he just want to bounce on it when it comes to bed time?

What actually happened when it came to it, was that he sat on the changing mat while I was getting him ready for bed and kept pointing at the bed saying, "Bed! Bed!" I then put him in it, gave him his teddy and his dummy, and he settled down. I did lie down with him until he fell asleep and I'm very pleased to say that getting myself off his bed was a lot easier than getting me, Torin and teddy off our bed and into his room, which is what has happened until now. Obviously, being seven months pregnant, was making that very difficult!

Who knows how long he'll stay in his bed tonight? We're very prepared to have to go up several times this evening as I guess he may fall out a few times and I fully expect to be woken in the middle of the night by my child standing next to my face (hopefully this won't make me jump too much!). At least though for now, he's sound asleep and looking very cute in his big boy bed.

Can't stop looking at . . .

Each week, I'll be sharing with you something that has caught my eye. It may be a picture, blog, product or website.

Is it just me, or has this week gone really slowly? Anyway, it's Friday and therefore time for me to share something that has caught my eye recently.

I don't have a wedding to plan (in fact David and I have just celebrated our fourth anniversary), but if I did, I would really consider using something as pretty as these as my place settings:

Image from here.

Beautiful, don't you think?

Hope you all have a lovely weekend. This weekend I'll be mostly watching rugby (Wales v Argentina), going mattress shopping for Torin's bed, and catching up with friends. 

Decorating with Multistem.

While looking at my desk tidy the other day, it occured to me that the colour scheme for every room in my house can be created by using colours in groups of three, from Orla Kiely's multistem pattern.

Image from here.

For example, in my living room and dining room I've used olive green, red and brown. Although the walls in our bedroom are meant to be a mocha colour, they often look quite pink, and we've also used grey and brown in there. Our bathroom is grey with some brown furniture and blue accessories. In Torin's room the walls that were meant to be Dulux's Nude Glow, are quite pink in some light, and I've also used blue and green in there.

You get the picture. Once I realised that this seemed to be the case, it struck me that it was actually quite a good way to use colour in our house and to also get a cohesive look overall - I've always thought the colours in the multistem pattern go together wonderfully.

Carrying on this idea for the new nursery then, I think I've decided to keep the walls their existing colour (a little bit pink), and use chartreuse and orange (in the form of perhaps a shade of apricot) accents. What do you think? Do you think that combination would make a good room for a little girl?

Can you guess . . .

what we're having?

Yep! We're expecting a girl! We've known for a few weeks now, and I think I'm just about getting used to the idea! For some reason I'd assumed the baby was another boy, so it really took me by surprise when the ultrasound assistant said that we were going to be having a little girl! I'm very pleased that we're going to have "one of each" though!

I know it may sound a little strange, but having a girl seems like so much more of a responsibility than having a boy - from choosing her name, to deciding what she'll wear. 

For the most part I guess she'll wear Torin's old clothes - I've always made sure his clothes are quite neutral in case we did have a girl in the future, and the walls of her nursery can stay the same colour (as you can see here, it's fine for a girl). However, I do want to ring the changes and give her her own space, and some things that haven't belonged to her brother, so I'm beginning to get excited and preparing myself for her arrival by planning the finer details of her bedroom - I'm sure further posts will follow on this!

Torin's bed has arrived!

I'm very excited today because Torin's bed was delivered! I wrote about it here - it's the single Hastings bed from Marks and Spencer. I chose to get it from there because I knew that it would be good quality, and that things should be less likely to go wrong with its delivery as Marks and Spencer pride themselves so much on their good name. I'm pleased to say that they didn't disappoint - they contacted me when they said they would, gave me a delivery slot of two hours, and even called prior to arriving to say that they were 45 minutes away.

When the bed arrived, the two delivery men took the bed up to Torin's room and built it for us - it took them less than fifteen minutes and they did a really good job - it feels really sturdy. And the best part? All of this was included in the price of the bed! No delivery charge, and no installation charge!

Here's the bed in Torin's room:

I hope this pic doesn't make the bed look too orangey. It's actually a lovely warm golden stain rather than orange pine!

We haven't yet got a mattress for it, as in the reviews of the bed on the M&S website two people had advised to buy a deep mattress to go with this bed - can you see that the slats actually sit quite deeply within the bed frame? I wanted to see the bed for myself before I made a decision on which mattress to buy, and now that I've seen exactly how deep the bed is, I will be following their advice and looking for a deep mattress.

Torin will go into this bed as soon as we've ordered a mattress and it arrives, but the bed's only staying here temporarily, as Torin will be moving into the back bedroom when his little sibling arrives (exciting news on this coming tomorrow!).

In other news . . .

I wanted to say a big thank you to the 10 people who are following me on here - thank you to: 

Bridget of Life As An Amateur Homemaker

Fay of Dreaming of an Aga

Suzanne of And My House

C at the Bristol Parenting Cafe 

Rachel of Tattered Rose

Hannah of Camera and Crochet

Jo

Karen

Bec-a-nory

and beautiful square feet's newest friend:

Megan of The Messy Little House

Thank you all for your support!

Can't stop looking at . . .

Each week, I'll be sharing with you something that has caught my eye. It may be a picture, blog, product or website.

This fabric from VillaNova would be perfect for the new curtains I really want in our living room and dining room.

The Garland fabric from their High Society collection, would go so well in my room in the Cherry colourway (take a look here for a reminder of my chosen paint colours). Wisteria and Olive would be another option - both are lovely and would complement the olive paint and red accessories that are already in the room. It's a shame that it's so expensive because I'm going to need a lot of fabric to replace the curtains we already have - we have high ceilings plus one large window and a back door that need curtains.

Here's a zoomed in version of the fabric so you can see the pattern repeat more easily:

Here's a version that's zoomed in even further so you can see the print in greater detail:

All images from here.

Reader, I bought it.

Knowing that I had a purse full of Next vouchers, I couldn't resist popping in there and treating myself to the recycled red glass vase I mentioned here. I'm really pleased with it and how it looks in this corner of our living room.

The plan here, is to firstly put some more screws in that shelf so that it doesn't dip down anymore (!) and then to hang the Vogue picture, which was a twenty-first birthday present from my brother and sister, on the wall. That will free up some more space on the shelf and I'll then put another olive green vase (the same as the one in the bottom right of this picture) on the shelf next to the red vase.

I was reading this post over at Decor8 the other day, and it got me thinking about this corner. As I've mentioned above, there are a few little tweaks that I want to make to this alcove, but overall, I rather like it at the moment. Now, to get to work on the other corners in my house . . .

Let me know if you want to know sources for anything else in this picture.