An English Country Garden Inspired Mural For A Child's Bedroom

Welcome to any Findettes visiting this morning! I'm Alice, and I like sanding things with power tools and then painting them. My husband and I live in a leafy South Manchester suburb along with our toddler and baby daughters and two Jack Russells, where we've recently decided not to move to France after all and instead are busy DIY renovating our Victorian house. You can view our house tour here, check out our main before and after gallery here, and our plans for the house here.

It's done! Two weeks of hard work and Natalia has a magical English country garden on her wall, complete with rose-covered thatched cottage, duck pond and a unique apple tree bearing a couple of rogue strawberries, cherries and pears. After months of visualising it in my head, I'm so happy with how it's turned out.

I ended up replacing the second, smaller tree shown in the rough design with a large sun, moving several of the animals around, adding lots of extra flowers, and filling the sky with stars, birds and butterflies.

Now it's done, we've finally been able to move her out of the spare bedroom and install her cot under the watchful eyes of the nocturnal garden creatures - a badger, owl and bat (plus moon and stars).

Here's a close-up of the badger:

And the owl:

Eva loves the giant bunny perched on the cottage roof:

Two familiar Jack Russells also make an appearance, one with obligatory tennis ball:

And here's the mural in animated form, from the initial watering can to the final birds and chimney smoke.

You can view a larger image of the mural here, if you like.

Next on the list for Natalia's room - putting the final touches to her chair, making curtains, and buying some Annie Sloan paint to *finally* paint the wardrobe that's been languishing in pieces in the cellar for the past six months.

Designing The Perfect Family-Friendly Kitchen

Natalia's mural is well underway! I've painted the cottage, apple tree, watering can, pond, roses, bluebells, frog, squirrel, ducks, cat, chickens, rabbit, daffodils, badger, mouse and hedgehog. Everything I've done so far has passed the toddler identification test ("is a bunny! is duckies! is pretty flower!") so that's a relief.

Work on the mural is taking up all my evenings and weekends at the moment, so I haven't had much time to blog or work on other projects - but I have been giving a lot of thought to our forthcoming kitchen renovation and ground floor extension. Because the kitchen will be housed in the new side extension, I need to work out exactly how much space we're going to need.

Here are some of the things on our wish list for creating the *perfect* family-friendly kitchen.

• Drawers rather than cupboards - we had these in our beloved scarlet red gloss kitchen in our first house and they were fantastic. We even had a drawer under the sink for all our cleaning products.

• Laundry basket for all the filthy towels and baby bibs we seem to accumulate on a daily basis.
• Conversely, somewhere to store clean towels, tea towels and bibs.
• Drawer in the kitchen island to be used for storing random items and sweeping contents of island into it in order to tidy up quickly.
• Filing cabinet and shredder - this may sound like an odd thing to have in the kitchen, but we end up with paperwork hanging round in the kitchen for days before it gets taken upstairs and either filed or shredded - it would be much more efficient to deal with it immediately.
• A floor that won't smash everything that gets dropped on it (so no tiles, stone or slate). Anything in a pale colour or with pale grout is also off the list thanks to our mud-lovin' dogs. If it's cold underfoot, we'll also need underfloor heating.

• A dedicated cupboard for all the recycling.
• Kitchen bin in cupboard - maybe the kind where the lid opens automatically when you open the cupboard door? We also need to make sure that if we have underfloor heating, we don't extend it underneath where the bins will be located...
• I like the idea of having some kind of small round hole (with a lid) in the kitchen island with the green recycling container below, so vegetable scraps can be swept directly into it from the worktop.
• Induction hob with flexinduction zone. After years of cooking only with gas, I'm planning to be converted to the 30 second pan boil.
• Ideally a French-door style fridge-freezer. It doesn't need to include a water and ice unit (which take up valuable space inside) because we also plan to include...
• ... A separate cold filtered water tap that isn't located within the main work triangle.
• Pop-up sockets in kitchen island with USB port.
• Two dishwashers!
• Various places for storing oddly sized things like tall cereal boxes, baking trays, cookery books, and long rolls of tin foil and clingfilm.
• An extractor fan with an external motor.
• Plate warming drawer.
• Pull-out sprayer attachment on the kitchen tap for rinsing things off more easily.
• Belfast sink.
• 90cm integrated oven.
• Separate 60cm integrated oven.
• Countertop combination microwave (yikes, have you seen how much an integrated version costs? No thanks!).
• Worktops at a comfortable height so you don't have to stoop over.
• Tall larder cupboard with individual pullout shelves (rather than one single pullout unit)
• Wire basket storage for potatoes and other vegetables.

The washing machine, tumble dryer, wine rack and overflow pantry items will all be located in the cellar so we don't need to worry about those.

Right. I think that's it. Blimey! Now all I need to do is rationalise all the above into one single, efficient, beautiful design that we can DIY install for not very much money once the builders have constructed the shell. Ha!

So, readers, I need your help. What do you love about your kitchen? What drives you mad about your kitchen on a daily basis? Please let me know!

How To Design A Child's Mural

Eva's pink paradise of a bedroom (and mural) was one of the nine finalists in the Home Love competition! And the overall winner drawn out of the hat was Hannah from Away With The Fairies - you can see her lovely vintage-inspired bedroom here.

I'm happy to say that I've *finally* started on Natalia's 'English country garden' themed mural. I've had the design in my head for months now so it's immensely satisfying to get the first brush strokes up there on the wall. To get to this stage, I followed the same steps that I took with Eva's mural. First of all, I drew a very (very!) rough sketch of the design showing the main features - a cottage, a pond and a tree. I also made a list of everything I wanted to include, from watering cans and plant pots to ladybirds, foxes and owls.

I then switched from paper and pen to the tinternet (not least because any paper that gets left lying around is pounced upon and cut into tiny pieces by Eva, who has just learned to use a pair of scissors and is highly delighted with herself). Using Google Images, I downloaded simple line drawings of all the different elements.

Finding the right images took a little effort - for example, to find a suitable hedgehog I had to search for "pencil drawing hedgehog", "simple drawing hedgehog", "kids drawing hedgehog", "child pencil sketch hedgehog", "cute drawing hedgehog", "hedgehog drawing -sonic" and so on. Google Images also has an option to search for line drawings only.

The following images are all returned by the search term "hedgehog line drawing" - the one on the left is far too detailed, the middle one is nice and simple but isn't cute enough! And the one on the right is perfect :-)

Next, I measured the wall and created a new blank image in PhotoShop with the same measurements (scaled to a manageable size). One by one, I added all the different elements, each with their own layer. In most cases I had to erase the background of the individual image with the magic and background eraser tools so I could layer it on top of the others without obsuring the ones at the back. I also used the brush tool to add some rough lines for the cottage (I searched and searched but could not find a suitable line drawing of a cottage so had to use a photograph instead), pond and hills.

Here's the finished design. My aim at this stage is just to work out roughly what to put where - chickens on the roof, bluebells at the foot of the tree, and so on. I find it easier to add the detail straight onto the wall without drawing it all out precisely in advance.

I printed off the design, drew grid lines onto it, and then replicated them in chalk on the wall. And finally, working from the main design to get the right location and a larger image of the item itself, I painted on the first element - the watering can on the left.

The paint is going on with quite a chalky finish so I'm to have to go over it a couple of times to get the right contrast.

Natalia woke up from her nap just in time to supervise progress. Apparently the paint I'm using met to her satisfaction.

I hope you enjoyed this little behind the scenes peek at how things get started around here. And now it's time for beef stew, homemade limoncello (well, why not!) and Netflix. See you again soon!