Framing pictures can be an expensive business. We have dozens of pictures sitting in our cupboard and not on our walls. The other day I decided to sort this out by setting up my own framing workshop. I figured that for the same price as getting a couple of pictures...
Buying a house can be a right pain. More than once we thought we had a done deal only for things to fall though. The task was also complicated by fussiness. My head said this is your first home, you won’t be here forever, just find something cheap and do it quickly....
The first time my wife clapped eyes on the kitchen in our new home she suggested that we might want to get rid of the brown, orange and cream tiles. From that moment on, their days were numbered. I didn’t think they were particularly offensive, but my...
The far end of our kitchen had been used by the previous owners as a small dining area. We decided to shift eating activity into the adjacent dining room, thus creating a space which we decided to fill with a storage bench. The idea was to build a bench with three...
I discovered the other day that I could recite the whole of Each Peach Pear Plum from memory in under 30 seconds. I must have read that book several hundred times with Gregor. We have had some serious fun with bedtime reading over the first two years, dusting...
Ikea is back, and this time in the form of a mini-kitchen. Our son Gregor has had an affinity for all things kitchen related since birth. The washing machine, which mercifully has a child-lock, has provided hours of entertainment, and heaven forbid we attempt to...
I bet every first-time buyer’s house has a box in the garden shed, or under the stairs that looks a bit like this: Hundreds of pounds spent on 50ml pots of fractionally different shades of essentially the same colour. A rummage through our box reveals: Natural...
photo credit: Matthew Ace, www.ninefourphotography.co.uk There are plenty of blog posts devoted to sofa choosing (for example here and here), so instead of re-packaging the same tips, I’ll take you through our own sofa odyssey, from the dark days of futon to the...
With the bottom half complete (see part one), and looking pretty dam good, I’ve been keen to get this job finished. This involves knocking up a set of shelves to sit on top of the cupboard unit. My strategy is to build them as a separate unit, slide them on top, and...
Anta Cushions We bought these beautiful cushions with wedding vouchers. Anta is a company based in Tain in the North East of Scotland that produce high quality furniture and linens. Their products don’t come particularly cheap – hence the empty-space on our bedroom...
