Anyone who says motherhood is a full time job is either playing it down or has an army of staff. It is FIVE jobs at least – a housekeeper, a cleaner, a cook, a nanny and baby’s personal entertainer.

Nicholas is STRONG-willed, curious, sweet, cuddly and SO MUCH FUN. Such a little lion cub. (There is a danger of lion-themed toys and prints taking over my house, help!)
I am LOVING being a mummy to the most incredible boy on the planet (I am genetically programmed to think this way, so just roll with it, k?). I can’t quite work out whether the last 6 months have flown by (he seems to be growing up SO FAST) or feel like forever (I can barely remember life before him). His smiles make me melt into a puddle and his laughs make my heart soar. I am virtually exploding with love and joy and pride every day.

Amidst the melting, exploding and soaring, my days are swallowed up in house tasks, taking him out and preparing to move house, so I have sort of lost touch with a lot of other things, like the rest of the world, particularly online. I hope you’ll forgive my lack of presence in blogland. I rarely spend any time on my Macbook these days. In fact I snapped these photos over a month ago and have only just uploaded them. I do expect to get back to blogging regularly and interacting with my favourite blogs… I just don’t know when yet.

Anyway, how do you keep up with your favourite blogs? Do you use an RSS reader? The blogs I usually follow are organised by category in Google Reader but that is getting the axe (silly decision, Google) so I need to switch to an equally useful alternative. Sarah of Modern Country Style wrote a great informative post about Google Reader alternatives and favours Feedly. Do YOU use Feedly? Do you like using it? Any users of any other readers? I should check out all the options myself but my spare time is non-existent right now and you’re all super-helpful, so do let me know your recommendations please. Ta very much!

For the contest, I am submitting my dining room, which has been a real labour of love in every sense of the phrase. Lots of labour and lots of love (and a teensy budget). Now that the labour part is over, there is just lots of love for the room.

My favourite room!

This room connects to the living room, the kitchen and the stairs, so it is pretty much the central hub of the home. For me, it is buzzing with creative energy while also perfectly fitting into the happy, relaxed and eclectic style that personifies my hubby and me. A mix of old and new, everything has been acquired over time from different places including an antiques saleroom, a local art and craft fair, even a flea market in Amsterdam, with a few items from retail stores.

The painting sitting behind the Dutch vases on the bookcase (below) is a reproduction of Edward Hopper’s Capron House (1933). I painted it just to see if I had any talent with a paintbrush.

My proudest creative endeavour is making over the vintage pine farmhouse table and chairs set which came from an auction house, complete with knocks and dents. I love how deep the table is – it makes it very social and we can fit up to 8 people around it at a squeeze. The original finish wasn’t quite our style though, so I got to work on it, staining the table dark and painting the chairs a lovely pale stone colour.

Yup, that’s me getting down and dirty.

When we put the room together, it was just for me and hubby. Now we have a little boy and he seems to be enjoying the room as much as the grownups do! And no childproofing required for the solid old furniture – any knocks he (inevitably) adds will simply add to the character and memories.

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What is your favourite spot or room in your home?

While I’m still taking a break from blogging here, I’ll be continuing the conversation on facebook, so do join me there if you can.

I hope you are all enjoying the festive season and having fun with your loved ones. My little cub and I wish you all a joyful Christmas and a fantastic new year!

Hello everyone! My name is Nicholas. My mummy was feeling a bit tired so I put her down for a nap and thought I’d use this opportunity to introduce myself. I am now 3 weeks old. I am the new assistant at First Sense. Mummy and I will be back blogging in the near future, so we will catch you all again soon!
 

Lovely worn leather, classic design, timeless style

Before we carry on with beautiful leather sofas, can we just very quickly touch on the vast number of hideous leather sofas in the market? Why are such things even being made?? I get that leather sofas are generally bought for their practicality, but why not add in a bit of style to the list of criteria for such a significant piece of furniture? Please can people stop fuelling any further demand for fugly ones like these:

Bleurgh! Definitely NOT hot!

Enough of the nasties. Now we can relax with some inspirational pretties which not only marry durability with incredible style, but would also be investment pieces as they are sure to be loved forever.

via Desire to Inspire

Hard to go wrong with a chesterfield! This one is from Anthropologie but you could probably find a similar vintage one at a good price if you looked around.

via The Brick House

Lovely pale turquoise leather; via Design*Sponge

The style of this lovely warm grey leather sofa from West Elm is rather like a modern take on a chesterfield.

Which one of these would you pick if you could take it home with you?

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In other news, I am about ready to pop so I’ll say ciao for now to the blogging world.

I’ll be back after the event, when I feel I have regained some of my wits about me!

xxx

Catalog Living (which I discovered recently via Domestic Sluttery and lost a fair few hours to) is a hoot of a website created by Molly Erdman who pretends that a couple called Gary and Elaine do in fact live in the pages of such catalogues.

 
This one below is my favourite (no prizes for guessing why!) -

On the success of Catalog Living, Molly also brings similar humour to a feature on curbed.com called Magazine Living -

Self-Absorbed

Hunting for Serenity

Game for Anything

These funnies are just a taster. Check out Catalog Living and Magazine Living on Curbed for lots more (hours of amusement). There is even a book for those of us who like a bit of light-hearted wit mixed in with pretty styling in the books on our coffee table!

Available on Amazon.
Is it going on your wishlist?

All images are linked to their original sources on Catalog Living and Curbed.

I have finally started thinking about the baby things I need to get and this weekend, amidst watching the Olympics and sniggering at Tory MP Aidan Burley for showing the nation what a complete tool he is*, I finished working on baby’s first piece of furniture. On hindsight, (electric) sanding, priming and painting are best not done when 6 months pregnant, but I really didn’t have the time before now plus I needed some decent weather to do the sanding outside. I got there in the end.

Excuse the poor eBay listing photo, I forgot to take a ‘Before’ photo myself

I scored this solid pine chest of drawers for a bargain on eBay, in perfect condition, just the size I was looking for and the ‘tray’ around the top allows it to become a very useful changing station. But I wasn’t going to subject baby to the orangey-pine varnish… bleurgh!

You may have gleaned my love of sunshine yellow in kids' rooms from my nurseries post. Little Greene’s Mister David paint colour could not have been more perfect! It really is like sunshine in the room, even on a grey day.

Excuse the lack of styling. I couldn’t be arsed after all the tiring positions I had to manoeuver my big belly into in order to paint the dresser.

Now I just need to get a changing mat… and all the other baby paraphernalia… and get busy with my sewing machine to craft a few special things for baby.

Anyway, back to the subject of seeing potential in an old piece of furniture. A few weeks ago, this vintage bedroom chair sold for just £10 at my local auction house.

Old bedroom chair seeking new life

Besides looking a bit tatty, its frame was in pretty decent condition. My hands were itching at that price, I almost bid for it, but I made myself stay still. As much as I would have loved to have given it new life, I don’t have the resources right now (time or money) to be running around fabric houses and upholsterers. But just think of what it could’ve been! One rather snazzy example below –

Bedroom chair potential! Image via House to Home

If you found a couple of bedraggled antique chairs, what would you do with them? I love the modern twist given to these chairs -

via 508 (click on image to enlarge)

This card-cabinet-turned-console-table below is my favourite makeover to date. I love that they had the vision to see so much potential in an old humdrum card cabinet and turn it into a rather fabulous and useful console.

via Design*Sponge (click on image to enlarge)

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* That’s it for the subject of the post. But you may have noticed a little asterisk near the start. I don’t talk politics in this blog, because well, that’s not why you read it, but I feel compelled to say how utterly flabbergasted I am at the comments made about the Olympics opening ceremony by prize idiot MP Aidan Burley who called it “leftie multi-cultural crap”. Even after his comments caused a flurry of criticism, he continued to dig a deeper hole for himself.
  It would have been easy to produce a robotic bonanza of a show but Danny Boyle’s creative genius made the ceremony joyous and bonkers, charming, moving, humorous yet earnest, and human. It showcased revolutions that changed the way of life not just in this country, but the whole world. It rejoiced in what makes Britain great and in its people. It was a spectacle that evoked a heart-swelling pride at being British, certainly in myself and probably in most of the nation. And I wasn’t even born here. If anyone is interested, comedian Paul Sinha does a rather brilliant job of putting Burley out with the trash in his blog article “Aidan Burley MP. Hello, from a fellow Brit.”

Perhaps I should have titled this post “Seeing potential… and a touch of politics”. Don’t worry, I don’t plan to make politics a habit on this blog!
 

Good looking storage is hard to come by without a hefty price tag so if you’re up for a bit of DIY, an old or humdrum piece of furniture can be made into something rather spectacular. If you don’t have a vintage piece that’s crying out for a makeover, have a look at IKEA’s untreated wood products which encourage you to get creative with the finish you want – paint, stain, wax, decoupage…

The RAST and TARVA chests of drawers are particularly popular as they are inexpensive and can be adapted to just about any setting. How cute would these two below be for kids?

Livet Hemma

Livet Hemma

 
Some more RAST and TARVA makeovers for ideas -
 

Images: Design*Sponge, Crafty Sisters, House to Home, Nothing but Bonfires

Images: Lucy Jane, Breadbox, Honey & Fitz

 
Have you seen or done any cool furniture makeovers lately?
 

If, like me, you don’t take yourself too seriously, love a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour and have a little geeky side, you will love his art too!
 

**chuckle**

Princess Leia / Marilyn Monroe mashup

Who but the Time Lord can really define time?!

You need to have watched the TV series The Thick Of It or the movie In The Loop to really get this. If you have watched either, you’ll know this should really say “NO WE F@!&ING CAN’T”

A Dr Seuss quote we all love!

Check out Barry’s Folksy and Etsy shops for lots more of his fantastic work. The screenprints are super affordable given that they are original hand-pulled limited editions. I know where I’ll be looking for Colin’s next present… the hard part is going to be choosing which one(s) to buy!

Images from Barry D Bulsara’s website and Etsy shop

The ‘Spot the Difference’ photos were taken at 5 weeks (when we found out) and at 20 weeks (which was last week), so I’m over half way there!! WEEEEEEE! SO excited to meet my little bambino!!

We are hoping to move house soon, so it is unlikely that I’ll be decorating the nursery any time soon. Whether we move before the baby is born or after depends largely on how the housing market treats us, so it’s a bit up in the air for now. Nonetheless, I have been like a magpie when it comes to collecting images of creative, happy nurseries, so I’ll have plenty of ideas for when I am let loose on the decorating! Here are a dozen of my favourites, ranging from pink and girly to gender neutral to baby boy ‘bachelor’ pads, each with gorgeous ideas:
 

Amy Meier Design

Sweet and chic! I like that the ceiling was painted peachy-pink rather than the walls. The curtain fabric is darling and the chair upholstered in big red gingham fabric is sweet without being too girly. The gallery wall contains pages from a book of children’s poems and drawings – lovely!

found on Flickr

Again loving that the pink is kept off the walls and put on the floor this time, in the form of hot pink carpet tiles (very practical). Pale aqua is such a lovely soft wall colour for a little girl’s room. The giraffe shape looks like it is done with vintage wallpaper (totally do-able). A plain white roman blind can be painted using little handmade stencils et voilà – it becomes instantly more interesting!

Armelle blog

Soft blue walls again – really work so well for a little girl’s room. I love the sunny yellow cot! Like sunshine in the room.

Ninainvorm

Another painted cot which was a vintage find. The wallpaper and vintage items give this adorable nursery a comfy and happy charm. The nursery later housed a larger cot in a similar style – that one got painted a bright yellow – check it out here.

via The Boo and The Boy

It seems I have a thing for sunny yellow in nurseries! It might have something to do how grey the skies have been lately in the UK. The window seat is so cute, I can imagine a little’un sat up there enjoying a read.

Lay Baby Lay

Aqua and coral: absolutely love this beautiful girly nursery, from the sublime wall colour to the coral accents to the beautiful dresser turned into a changing table. If you are looking for a stream of nursery ideas, check out all the amazing moodboards created by Joni on Lay Baby Lay.

via Design Chic

A fun teepee, lovely big art and a beautiful carved (vintage?) sideboard for storing toys – love it all.

via Stadshem

I would love to give my bambino a large map. I know I would’ve loved one as a kid, and if I’d had one, perhaps my geography wouldn’t be so pitiful!

Elizabeth Sullivan Design

Books are cool! So I love this nursery corner and how the books form a colourful feature wall. The striped ceiling is cute too!

via Livingetc

Another striped ceiling in a very cool boy’s room. It’s yellow! Click here to see how this boy’s room decor has matured as he has grown. The rugs, black wall, chest of drawers, ceiling light and striped yellow ceiling all remain, showing they got it right the first time!

via Mix and Chic

I like the grey camouflage walls – cooler than having just plain grey. And oh, there’s the sunny yellow again!

Design Crisis

Erin of Design Crisis calls this room her son’s baby bachelor pad! Click on the image source link to see how she put it all together and to get a closer look at the room. I love how well she mixed all the lovely vintage finds with new white baby furniture and created a very practical, hardwearing and downright gorgeous boy’s room!

Have you decorated for a little person? Any more ideas or tips? Do share!