Honestly, These Photos Are Taken In Manchester

So along with all the random second hand furniture and the turquoise bathroom, it turns out that we've also inherited a ridiculously glorious wisteria.

We've also had a week of gorgeous hot weather, so I've been working outside with wisteria petals drifting gently down onto my laptop. Can someone pass me a Pimms, please?

The Importance Of Nutella To Home Renovation

The spare room is finished! And was road-tested very successfully over the weekend by lovely friends visiting from Germany. Yes, I need to take after photographs. No, I haven't taken after photographs yet. In my defence, I'm exhausted after five days of supervising international toddler wrestling over umbrellas, lunch boxes and booster seats (why did they both want to carry the booster seat around?! Ah, the mysteries of the toddler mind) plus visits to Tatton Park, Chester Zoo, and Head over Heels. So photographs will come but first I need to have a lie down and recover my strength.

In the meantime, we've started working on the afore-mentioned toddler's big girl bedroom. The hideous dusty old carpet has been removed with glee, and floor sanding and wall plastering have commenced. Dust city. We've moved her up to the spare bedroom while the work is carried out, a change which apparently she found most invigorating, if the excited squeals coming through the baby monitor at 7am this morning were anything to judge by.

Her new room is going to be raspberry pink, blue, aqua and peach. Yep, I'm still fully embracing colour. And I'm also fully OK with using pink in a girl's bedroom - while the distinction in most British toy shops between girls' toys (pink, sparkly, princessy, dolls, tea-sets, lego cupcakes etc) and boys' toys (bright, colourful, imaginative, pirates, diggers etc) fills me with righteous rage, I figure that if I'm OK with pairing hot pink and yellow in the guest bedroom, then I'm also OK with pairing hot pink and aqua in my daughter's bedroom. If we have a little boy one day and he likes pink, then he can have a hot pink bedroom too. That's how we roll.

Here's the colour scheme inspiration:

Sources: Martha Stewart, Canadian House and Home via Poppytalk, Little Bit Magazine via Somewhere Splendid and Etsy PartyPoms.

And here's the furniture and accessories inspiration:

Sources: House to Home, Pier 1, Ikea, Jenny Lind via Apartment Therapy, Kids Curtain Company and The Company Store.

We've already got a mirrored chest of drawers (currently in our bedroom) the Ikea table and chairs (which she loves, and insists on carrying from room to room with her) and the gorgeous Destination fabric, which I have turned into four huge curtains (why did we buy a house with enormous bay windows? why? and good grief, don't even get me started on all the stairs). We probably won't buy an actual Jenny Lind bed, but I do like the idea of hot pink furniture. I'm also currently stalking wardrobes on eBay with a view to snaffling a French style armoire in need of renovation, and wallpapering the interior.

I also have ambitious plans to paint a huge mural on the raspberry pink wall (one wall will be raspberry, and the other three will be a light teal blue - yes, it will be a feature wall and I'm OK with that) consisting of various famous landmarks - Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, Sagrada Familia, the Pyramids, Big Ben and so on (to co-ordinate with the curtains) and lots of animals (camels, snakes, lions, tigers, giraffes etc). Considering I don't have the energy to take a few simple after pictures of the spare room you may think I have bitten off more than I can chew with this one, but I reckon a few spoonfuls of Nutella (mmmmm, Nutella) and I'll be sugar-high and ready to go. I'll just have a little lie down first and rest my eyes. Mmmmm, day-time naps are the best.

The Benefits Of Accidentally Purchasing A Second-Hand Furniture Store

If you've seen pictures from our house tour, then you'll know that along with three floors of shabby Victorian gloriousness, a turquoise bathroom, red bedroom and so on, we also acquired four cellar chambers crammed with vast amounts of random items left behind by the previous owners. "Sure thing", said I (naturally keen to ensure we weren't left standing around outside the house on moving day with a lorry full of furniture while the sellers frantically finished clearing the basement), "we're quite happy for you to leave any DIY products behind - wood, paint, tools and so on - if that would make it easier for you to get the cellars cleared".

Hmm. I'm not sure how the collection of ornamental walking sticks, commode, sinister plastic pig, mouldy garden furniture, mouldy ancient old fridge freezer that the seller tried to flog to us for £100, mouldy old shoes, filthy flip-top dustbins (at least ten of them) and so on, strictly qualify as 'DIY products' - but amongst the piles of tatty old rubbish, there exists a large amount of second-hand furniture. We needed a dining room table - a cursory inspection of the cellar revealed an old school desk (complete with graffiti) that, with a bit of sanding and some sturdy paint, is now nicely installed in the breakfast room. Chairs? Man, we have any number of battered old chairs. Bookcases? Take your pick - do you prefer retro metal or wood-worm effect?

So when I needed a couple of side tables for the spare bedroom, I wandered down to the cellar, dug out a couple of wooden stools, sanded them down, painted one pink, and the other one yellow.

Lots of people have said lots of things about painting wood - whenever D*S posts a furniture make-over you can pretty much guarantee that someone will complain within the first five comments about the heinous crime that is painting over wood - my view is that while I would never paint a gorgeous wardrobe made from reclaimed oak, or a stunning antique mahogany sideboard, too right I'm going to paint over a couple of cheap battered old stools found in my own cellar that would only have been tossed out otherwise.

I didn't bother to prime them, and I also didn't use wood paint - I just used regular emulsion from a couple of left-over sample pots. If the stools were going to be placed in a high-traffic area (read: within reach of enthusiastic toddler who views the entire house as her art canvas) then I'd have done them properly, but they're just going in the spare room so I figure they'll be fine for now.

Next spare room project - curtains! I have 6 yards of glorious yellow and white fabric from all the way across the Atlantic, and I'm not afraid to use it to create fully lined curtains with invisible seams. Rock and roll, man. Rock and roll.