A little piece of Velcovsky in my bathroom.

So you know the old story - grandmother dies, and the old picture she had hanging over her dingy gas fire turns out to be an original Monet. Well something, admittedly not quite so dramatic as that, has happened in my house recently!

I've been making my way through Veronika's archives over at A Few Things From My Life (which I highly recommend by the way), and I learned from this post, that I've been using a piece of classic Czech design to house our toothbrushes!

This quirky porcelain cup was given to us several years ago by my uncle and his Czech wife (who live near Prague). At the time, I thought it was quite cool - the attention to detail is pretty impressive - it really is a good replica of a polystyrene cup. However, not realising its true status, it sat on our desk, occasionally containing the odd biro. When Torin accidentally broke the white ceramic cup that should sit in the chrome holder above (I think he knocked it out while swinging his toothbrush around his head (!)), I realised that porcelain cup sitting on our desk would be a great replacement.

Thanks to Veronika's post, I learned that the "Pure cup" as it's known, was designed by renowned Czech designer Maxim Velcovsky, who is known for his porcelain work, and also for redesigning the interiors of public buildings.

I have to admit that before I read Veronika's post, the barcode was turned around to face the wall so the cup was white against the pale walls of our bathroom. Now I know where it has come from, the barcode faces forward as it should, and funnily, suddenly I don't mind it so much!

Bathroom cabinet . . . finally!

A long long time ago, I wrote about looking for a cabinet to go in our bathroom. It was meant to be my birthday present from my parents that year. Well, on Friday I was finally able to call my dad and congratulate him for buying me my birthday present, albeit well over a year late! I successfully (with a little help from David who was watching the auction on a train heading back from Durham), managed to bid for and win a beautiful cabinet on Ebay, and yesterday we braved the pouring rain and drove to Pontypool to pick it up.

I'm really thrilled, as it's exactly what I'd wanted - size, colour, everything. Apparently, it used to display tiaras in a bridal boutique, and prior to that, it spent years in a watch shop, so it's got quite a quaint provenance too.

At the moment, it's sitting on top of another cupboard in the bathroom, as this is the safest option for the children, while I wait for the weekend when I can have David's help to put it up on the wall. It's going to eventually hang on this wall, but at a height that'll be just above the tallest frond on the aloe vera - it's going to look so good, and it should house loads of our bathroom paraphernalia. I'll post a few pictures when it's up on the wall!

Essential bathroom maintenance.

Sometimes essential DIY is so boring, don't you think? Give me a good feature wall to paint any day - making big, obvious changes is my kind of work. That's why today has been great for me - David has been sorting things out in our bathroom. Being a downstairs bathroom, it's not the warmest room in the house, and can therefore get a little damp. Even though I try to keep things spick and span in there, evil little mould spores still find their way in from time to time. The worst place is around the bath, and that's what David began to tackle today. 

We've tried to use sealant to form a watertight seal around the bath several times, but due to the monumental botch job left to us by the previous owner, the walls are so wonky that water still gets through. So, we had to come up with a (cheap) plan. We decided that a good solution, and one that would sit well with the history of our house, was to use edging tiles around the top of the bath. These would sit on top of sealant and then hopefully the grout and subsequent sealant would keep the water out, and we'd be left with a neat looking bath.

Here's how he got on today . . .

The little tiles help to make the bath look more solid, and as though it's always been there, rather than plonked in by a man who was trying to sell his retirement home bound mother's house quickly. We didn't have to look too far for somewhere that stocked tiles of these sort either - our first trip, which was to B&Q was fruitless, but we found this really useful kit in Topps Tiles.

Image from here.

This set is great for inexperienced DIYers as it contains enough tiles to do one long and two short sides of a bath, there are two end tiles that taper off at the edge to help the finished job look neat, and there are four tiles with mitred edges for the corners - hardly any cutting involved, perfect!

The only problem now is that the shiny new grout and sealant is showing up our previous efforts on the other tiles. Now, where did I put that white grout pen . . .?

Fabric choices for the bathroom blind.

I mentioned here that I was thinking about getting a blind for the window in our bathroom. Well, I've decided to definitely get one, and have had a quick look online for ones that would be suitable.

I was looking at John Lewis because I'd followed a link for sprung blinds that are suitable for children's rooms (more on this later on as I think I'll get one for Torin's new room). Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by the range of reasonably priced ready-made blinds that they had on their website. Look at this blind made in Sanderson's Dandelion Clocks fabric - it starts at only £35 which I think is quite a bargain as that fabric normally costs about £35 per metre anyway!

I think the colours would go really well in my bathroom, as the room is mostly grey with accents of blue. I think perhaps though, that this design has become too popular - it seems to appear everywhere (I actually bought a card showing this print for my mum on Mothers' Day this year) and has also been around for quite a long time. I do like it very much though - what are your thoughts?

I also really like this print - it's John Lewis' own design called Mayflower in Mineral.

Again, it'll go really well in the room and at only £30, it's cheaper than the Sanderson blind. I'm a little torn, but at the moment, I'm leaning towards the John Lewis design.

At midnight on Monday, sitting at the end of Torin's bed with my hand on his back, trying to get him back to sleep I ordered some other fabric swatches to see what they look like in situ. The two blinds above come as ready-made blinds and so if I chose one of the fabrics below I'd have to make my own, but I just thought I'd look at a good range of patterns before I went for one of the easy options above. Which is your favourite?

All images from here.

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.

I don't know if it's due to the lovely Spring-like weather we've had recently (it's been such a joy to hang washing out on the line again!), but this week I've found myself being rather drawn to nautical style fabric, especially those featuring birds. Isn't this wonderful fabric by Vanessa Arbuthnott pretty!

Image from here.

Also, what you can't see from this photograph is that the background of the fabric has tiny white dots all over it - you can see what I mean in the picture below:

Image from here.

 I also stumbled upon this similar fabric by Clarke and Clarke which is about a third of the price:

Image from here.

I'd love to use one of these fabrics to make a Roman blind for our bathroom window - I think it would really add some much needed warmth to the room. What do you think?

In a grey mood.

I finally got too annoyed with the paint swatches that I put on our bathroom wall ages ago. I had chosen three Dulux paints in various shades of grey, and only one of them actually seemed to look like the colour on the card. Therefore, the decision of which paint I actually wanted has still not been made. Anyway, yesterday I picked up a paintbrush and painted over them in the existing colour of the bathroom, just to get rid of them.

Just to remind you, this is the current colour of our bathroom - it's Mineral Haze 4 by Dulux:

I remember when I was having it mixed, the guy in the shop asked if I was sure I wanted this colour as it just looked white to him. At the time I just wanted a tiny hint of colour in there, as I was going for a very neutral look in the whole house. 

Now I'm a bit braver, I want something a little stronger, but as we will have to work with the existing tiles and suite in there, it'll have to be a colour that goes well. I still think a grey would be the best colour to go with, and recently a lot of pictures that have caught my eye have turned out to be walls painted in Farrow and Ball's Pavilion Gray.

However, when I looked at the colour on their website, it seemed quite brown to me - what do you think? Have any of you used this colour?

Image from here.

I think I might just go back to the Dulux website and order a few more grey testers. I think my first choice will be to see what the darker shades of Mineral Haze look like, as I do like the colour I have, but you can only really see that it isn't white when you look at the space where the walls meet the white ceiling.

In this picture, the left wall is painted in Mineral Haze 3, and the right wall is Mineral Haze 2.

Image from here.

Any other suggestions? Do you have any greys that you have used and liked?

The life story of an aloe vera plant.

I bought my aloe vera plant from IKEA several years ago - I think we may have even had it in our previous house - I think that is definitely a record time for me to keep a plant alive! I don't know if you've seen the size of the plants in IKEA, but they're certainly much smaller than my now giant plant that lives in my bathroom!

It had been sitting in this pretty pot on the window in our bathroom, but it was really getting too big to sit there comfortably, so I needed to find a new space for it. 

This was actually one of the reasons I decided to dismantle the old LEKSVIK IKEA corner cabinet we had in there - I knew the plant wouldn't fit on any of the shelves. Also, because the cabinet was so tall and against an outside wall, the back of it had gone a little mouldy. All in all, it was a good excuse to get rid of this cabinet, as I hadn't ever really liked it. We bought it because we were looking for a reasonably priced corner cabinet to house our TV in our old house, and this fitted the bill. However, I quickly went off it as it seemed to be trying too hard to look old, while being so obviously new and cheap.

Anyway, back to the aloe . . . it really needed re-planting, as you can see here (yes, that really is yet another paint sample on a wall in our house!):

As the sun shone here in Cardiff yesterday, I decided to make the most of the lovely weather, took Torin outside and re-planted the aloe vera. A Spanish friend of mine once said that an aloe vera should be re-potted when the pot it sits in becomes less than half the length of the plant's longest frond. I've always followed this advice and my plant seems to be thriving. I also only water it about twice a year (seriously!) - I think it really likes the humidity of the bathroom.

A few minutes later, after using compost and a pot we already had, the plant was sitting in its new home:

The white cabinet that is now in our bathroom used to be in an alcove in our living room, had the TV on it, and housed computer games and remote controls. It now contains toiletries and helps to make the bathroom feel bigger by being smaller and a paler colour than its predecessor.

NB. You may notice that there is a glass jar missing from the last picture . . . I guess it was only a matter of time before it got broken. Torin picked it up by the lid and of course, the jar fell off and smashed on the floor. I just didn't get to him in time, but I guess it wasn't really a smart place to keep it with a 2 year old around. Luckily, I managed to scoop him up before he trod on any of the glass - it was bathtime so he didn't have anything on his feet! Lesson learned - I'll be finding a new place to keep the remaining jar, and eventually it'll be kept in the wall mounted cabinet I still need to find and buy!

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 cabinet from Graham and Green, featured on the front of this month's Ideal Home magazine, is beautiful and would be absolutely perfect for my bathroom as it can be hung up on the wall. Unfortunately it's quite expensive at £295, and therefore beyond my price range (which at the moment is pretty much £0), but it is lovely.

Image from here.

I'll have to keep my eye out in second hand shops (and HomeSense!) for something similar. Actually, that may be better, because although this cabinet is gorgeous, it is new and therefore the distressed paint is a deliberate effect, albeit, "carefully considered" as it says on the website. A genuinely battered cabinet may in fact look better. We'll see though - I don't usually have much luck with finding pieces I like in second hand shops.

My home: an introduction.

In this mini-series, I'm going to share a selection of my favourite things from each room in our house. Hopefully these posts will provide you with a little insight into my style, and give you a peek into what our house is like.

Bathroom

Our bathroom is my next room to be featured in this series - I've mentioned before that our bathroom is downstairs, behind our kitchen, so it only seemed natural to focus on this room next.

The items I've focused on in this room are our medicine cabinet and "Jim", my metal bird sculpture:

Medicine cabinet

This little cupboard was a wedding present from my maternal grandmother. She picked it up at an auction, and it fits our needs perfectly. It's made of hard wood, and was made by soldiers who became injured in WWI. It has an inscription on the back that proves its provenance; unfortunately I can't take it off the wall to show you what it says, as I'm writing this while Torin is asleep upstairs having his afternoon nap and I'll wake him up if I go upstairs to get a screwdriver.

On the shelf are:

• a little blue and white china bowl from The Pier (now closed down)
• bath oils from The White Company (also a gift from my grandmother) - I love the simple packaging

"Jim" the metal bird

This was a birthday present from David a couple of years ago. That Spring, we had heard scratching in the chimney breast in our dining room - the chimney breast without an opening. Living in Cardiff, we often see seagulls nesting on chimney stacks, so our first thought was that a baby seagull had fallen down ours. We decided that we had to get it out, or the poor thing would certainly die (and begin to smell), so we took the grate off the wall. To our dismay, the hole in the wall behind the grate was approximately 3cm tall by 20cm long, so we had to widen the hole. David took a hammer and chisel and knocked a hole big enough for us to see what we were dealing with - a baby seagull that was by no means baby sized! Eventually we managed to widen the hole so it was big enough for David to reach in (with a gloved hand), and bring the poor bird out. He took it outside and placed it onto our patio table as we needed to see if it could fly away (we followed advice from the RSPB). Immediately, seagulls began circling our garden, screeching at the young bird. It didn't seem to be able to fly, and we were worried about our cats attacking it, so David plucked up the courage to go back into the garden (despite the now dive-bombing adults), and put the bird on the flat roof of our bathroom.

The bird stayed on our roof for about a week, and we named it Jim. Adult birds occasionally flew down to bring it food and one was always standing guard on our roof nearby. A few days into the following week, we heard a fracas in next door's garden and saw that Rufus our ginger cat had tried to have a pop at Jim, who must have tried to fly and ended up on the ground in their garden. The fracas was Rufus meowing and hastily retreating - seagulls can be vicious, and Jim certainly had back up. Over the next week or so, we would see Jim in different positions in the garden next door - he eventually managed to get up onto the roof of their shed. He then made it onto the roof of the house at the end of our garden. The day soon came when we went outside and couldn't see him anymore. This was a good thing - it meant he was fully grown up, fully healed, and free.

So, when David saw this metal sculpture in Homesense, he couldn't resist it. It always brings fond memories back every time I look at it, especially of David and our friend going out to check on Jim with umbrellas over their heads to protect them from swooping gulls!