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?

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.

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.

Overall room inspiration:

Sources: Est Magazine via Decor8, D*S, Rachel Whiting, Jamie Beck via Elements of Style.

We're going for white walls with yellow and pink accents. I should probably refer to the yellow and pink accents as pops of colour, but I just can't bring myself to do that without throwing up in my mouth a little.

Key details:

Sources: Marie Claire Maison via Automatism, Fabric, Yann Deret via Automatism,  Linens Limited, Photocard Boutique, House to Home.

After much searching, I've ordered this yellow and white print Suzani fabric from the US (for some reason you simply can't buy plain yellow and white prints in the UK. Weird, huh?). The shipping and import duty cost more than the fabric itself, but it's fabulous, I love it, and am busy turning it into curtains and cushions. We're also going to hang a display of mirrors (after a quick run round the house to gather up all the random mirrors left behind by the previous owners), and give a few items of furniture some ever-so-fashionable pink socks.

For some reason I'm driven towards a far-from-neutral palette in our new house. I think it's because it just feels right to fill a home for children with colour and pattern. It's a new direction for me, but I'm liking the results so far. After pictures to come!

The other day we began enthusiastically stripping wallpaper from the walls of the Very Dark Blue Room. Ably assisted by one over-excited toddler and two over-excited Jack Russells, the first wall went very well, revealing lovely fresh plasterboard. Aha! we thought. This will be easy! Cue hollow laughter, natch. All the other walls revealed hideously botched DIY plaster jobs (plastering over the top of Victorian wallpaper, anyone?), huge expanses of crumbling plaster that simply dropped off the wall leaving behind large holes, and on occasion, tufts of Victorian horsehair. 

Being naturally averse to the concept of actually paying people to do renovation work for us, we did some online research, consulted The Bible, watched some YouTube videos, went to B&Q, and got to work. This result just in - Alice and Andre: 1. Large hole in chimney breast: 0. Take that, sucker! 

A couple of weekends later, and we have a nice freshly plastered and (first coat) painted room that while not being perfect (in a few places, blind chipmunks appeared to have plastered the wall, resulting in the necessity for a few sessions with the sander to get it looking smooth) is certainly good enough. And cheap! We like cheap. 

We also hired a floor sander, and sanded 130 years of grime off the floors. Unfortunately as the floors are plank rather than tongue-and-groove, and are therefore slightly uneven in height, the big industrial floor sander didn't really work properly as it only sanded the highest part of the floor - besides being rather pricey (when you think we've got nearly 3000 square feet of floor to sand) and impractical from a limited hire-period perspective (we're usually kept somewhat busy on weekends on account of the previously mentioned over-excitable and thoroughly adorable toddler).

So we've purchased a rather splendid Makita belt sander and will be finishing the job by hand. Yikes. The room's already looking at least a zillion times better, however. Now we just need to repeat the process for the other 2900 square feet of house. Blimey. Can someone pass me a glass of wine, please?

And here we are - the proud possessors of a large, draughty Victorian house that hasn't been updated in 25 years. It's completely fabulous and we love every inch of it. Would you like to take a little tour?

Here's the rear elevation:

The playroom (which will eventually become a kitchen/diner):

The kitchen (or as we call it, the tiny unheated room with a cooker, sink, and a couple of wonky cupboards):

The master bedroom - because naturally one paints the ceiling red to match the red walls, adds a red carpet for variety, and a delightful mustard trim for interest:

The turquoise bathroom (someone actually took the time to hand paint the freize):

The cellar. Do you see the boxes on the table? They belong to us. Every single other item was left by the previous owners, who apparently thought we would value (among other things) a plastic commode, a large plaster statue of a pig wearing a butcher's apron and a sinister expression, and a collection of ornate walking sticks:

And the ornamental pond (which we have already drained on the grounds that it's hard enough keeping the dogs clean without providing them with a pool of filthy water to hurl themselves into repeatedly during the course of the day):

We also have a morning room, living room, three other bedrooms, two other cellars, and a second bathroom. Yep, we're clearly going to be renovating this house for the next ten years.

First up - the spare bedroom. Oh, the novelty of actually having room for overnight guests! We've already started ripping the dark blue wallpaper off the walls (uncovering large chunks of the original Victorian plaster, complete with original Victorian horsehair insulation. Plastering can't be that hard to DIY... right?

Except then we got one of these, which naturally comes with one of these, and then my in-laws came to visit for a weekend with their toddler and baby and filled our little casa with glorious chaos and seemingly the entire combined contents of Mothercare and Toys R Us. And then we looked on Rightmove that very night to see what we could get for our money.

Turns out that what we can get for our money is a near 3000 square foot Victorian beast of a house with cellars, three floors, an attic and a huge jungly garden, about five minutes from where we are now. Yes, it hasn’t been touched in twenty years. “Requires a smidgeon of cosmetic updating”, said the estate agent, hilariously. Yes, the kitchen is so very hideous that it didn’t even feature in the property brochure. Yes, it has a proper old-school fuse box instead of a nice, safe, consumer unit. And a minor damp problem in one of the bay windows. And some rotten timbers in the basement. And the bathroom is turquoise. And after buying it, we’re going to have precisely zero money left to do it up and thus will have to live in it as it is for at least a year (yikes). But it has high ceilings! And beautiful bay windows! And stained glass! And the original floorboards (hidden beneath twenty year old filthy carpets)! And a cold meat slab in the cellar! What more could one ask for?

Our new back garden - taken by the lovely current owner

We move next week. And now I have something to blog about again (I have spent the past year playing with our magnificent daughter and her array of plastic toys, and haven’t touched a paintbrush or a piece of sandpaper in months) so am hoping to resume a fairly regular posting schedule. Mostly comprised of pictures of terrifyingly dusty cellars and cold meat slabs, natch. You have been warned!

In 2009, one of the presents I gave Andre for Christmas was the perennial calendar Perpetual Paris from Little Brown Pen.

We assembled it, and hung it in our home office (and even painted the walls dark blue to enhance its beauty). In summer 2010, we turned our home office into a nursery for our beautiful daughter, Eva Bella (not that we knew our baby was going to be a girl at this stage) - and we kept Perpetual Paris on the wall cos with the numbers and high contrast colours it felt very baby-friendly.

So I felt inspired by Nicole to create my very own real-life Making it Yours featuring Perpetual Paris. Here's the first installment - Perpetual Paris gracing our home office.

Let's take a look at the mood board first...

And now let's check out some real-life photos of how this space turned out. Please forgive the quality - we haven't had any sunlight in Manchester for weeks!

In the next installment, we'll see how Perpetual Paris fits into our baby daughter's nursery. That is, if a certain gorgeous baby girl allows Mummy twenty minutes to write a quick blog post :-)

Uh uh, I thought. When I have a child, I will not give in to the plastic onslaught! There is no need for children to have brightly coloured plastic toys with flashing lights and tinkling noises! They should have nice wooden toys that will teach them to use their imaginations!

Fast forward several years, and Andre and I are now the very proud parents of an adorable baby girl. Here's how our living room is looking post-baba.

White shell chandelier:

Pottery vessels carefully arranged on open shelving:

Dining area with cream silk cushions and handmade art:

Vintage cabinet filled with heirloom linens:

Duck-egg blue cushions (and terracotta-and-white Jack Russell) to co-ordinate with the slightly lighter duck-egg blue walls:

And what's this vision of delight? Ladies and gentlemen, please make the acquaintance of the Fisher Price Rainforest Jumperoo:

Oh yes. We may not be adrift in a sea of plastic toys (they all get packed away at the end of the day once little one has gone to bed), but there is no packing away of a Jumperoo that takes up basically the same amount of space as the dining room table. It's hideous. And plastic. But Eva loves it, and spends whole minutes at a time! bouncing happily away in it.

Sometimes I think about making a nice fabric cover in the same material as the cushions that can be dropped over the main seat and activity centre bit at the end of the day, but then I remember I'd rather use my free time to, you know, sleep.

So yeah, I'm definitely a member of the 'give 'em a saucepan and a wooden spoon' school of baby entertainment, but what can I say, sometimes a huge plastic virulently coloured bouncing machine really hits the spot. Even if it doesn't co-ordinate with the chandelier...

Anyway, here I am again, and thanks to our recent acquisition of the world's most awesome baby toy (and quite possibly the most hideous) - also known as the hands-free kit for Mummies - I now have the use of both hands for at least 30 minutes a day, which I will try and use to do some blogging.

So let's kick things off in 2011 with a look at Eva's nursery. I loosely based the decor around my favourite poem, 'i carry your heart with me' by EE Cummings, especially the following lines:

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Just beautiful. So Eva's nursery includes a hand-painted mural of a tree, blue walls, a bird mobile, a leaf-patterned rug, black and white family photos, star-shaped fairy lights draped across the ceiling, heart-inspired art work, and a little tin heart hanging from the lampshade in the centre of the room (I used one of the paper lamps from our wedding decor). And of course, lots of books!

So without further ado, let's move on to the pictures...

I 'acquired' the giant teddy bear when I was a student, and subsequently moved him from one house to another for the next ten years. It's great to finally have a use for him! The guitar (just seen) is a Levin that belonged to my Grandpa - and yes, that's Perpetual Paris on the wall. More nursery details to come in future posts!