It's Orla tidied up.

I managed to snatch a few minutes the other day to peruse around John Lewis. I was very excited to see the new raised stem collection from Orla Kiely. I loved these cake tins - absolutely made me wish I a) was the type of woman who baked frequently, and b) had more room in my kitchen to display them (I could therefore store items other than cake in them!). Sadly, neither is the truth, so I will have to just stroke them like a loon (they're very tactile!) every time I see them.

I also really liked the raised stem storage canisters. Didn't I get a set of Orla Kiely storage canisters for Christmas? Yes, I did - and I'm putting them to great use. However, these are quite special and as usual, I love the colours, so I may have to sneak some into my house somehow. I'm currently trying to think of what I could store in the grey one in my bathroom.

Image from here.

A quick fix in the kitchen.

When we moved in to our house nearly six years ago, certain aspects like the kitchen and the bathroom weren't quite to our taste, but were too new to change. Fine - it meant that we moved in to a house with a modern kitchen and bathroom. However, our house was clearly modernised for sale, and modernised by a bit of a bodger.

For example, the kitchen cupboards were left incomplete - there were no end boards. Around the extractor hood looked like this:

The missing panels made what was already a budget kitchen, look even cheaper. Annoyingly, there wasn't enough room between the extractor and the cupboards to even fit on any end boards. I had to come up with another solution.

The answer came with sticky backed plastic! I found a roll of wood effect lino, cut it to size, and stuck it on.

After about an hour, after a lot of fiddling and huffing, my cupboards looked like this. Tons better don't you think? The lino helps to create the illusion that the cupboards are actually made of solid wood!

A quick fix that has made quite an impact, and all for about £6!