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! 

Happy Christmas, peeps! Thanks for reading - see you next year!

In case you haven't discovered Pinterest yet, it's freaking awesome. It's basically the answer to my what-on-earth-do-I-do-with-all-these-cool-online-pics-that-I-wanna-keep-for-inspiration problem.

Previously, whenever I came across a cool image online, I would save into onto my C Drive as a jpeg, but I quickly realised that not only would this end up taking up LOTS of storage (and we are already into terabytes territory chez nous), but I just couldn't figure out a way to easily record the link where I'd found the image, in order to give appropriate credit if I later used it on my blog. So I started saving links as bookmarks instead - which meant I ended up with links on my iPhone, Andre's iPhone, my work laptop, our PC upstairs, our PC downstairs... yep, that wasn't working out so well either.

Enter Pinterest. See a picture you like? Pin it, catalogue it, describe it, tag it, and save it onto your own nicely presented online notice board.

The only problem? According to the nice people at Pinterest (and also to Google in general), you can't pin images from an iPhone. It works from an iPad - and an iPhone app is in the works - but for now, if you're an iPhone user (and because in recent months I have become one-handed due to the requirement to carry a cute chubby baby girl around with me everywhere I go, browsing on an iPhone is the only option for me), then Pinterest is basically useless.

Unless, of course, you accidentally due to a stroke of sheer genius figure out how to pin images to Pinterest from an iPhone :-)

Oh all right then, enough of the talking, and on with the instructions...

First of all, you need to modify an existing bookmark on your iPhone. Select any old bookmark, and click Edit. Change the name of the bookmark to Pinterest (or Da Bomb, it's entirely up to you), and copy/paste the following into the URL window:

javascript:void((function(){var%20e=document.createElement('script'); e.setAttribute('type','text/javascript'); e.setAttribute('charset','UTF-8'); e.setAttribute('src','http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinmarklet.js?r='+Math.random()*99999999);document.body.appendChild(e)})());

It looks like a chunk of random characters, but it comes out in a nice long line in the URL window. Then click Done, and Done.

This code is taken from Pinterest's blog, and is part of their instructions for using Pinterest on the iPad. I figured what the heck, I'd try it on the iPhone - and lo and behold, while it doesn't work the way they describe (it's supposed to add the Pinterest bookmarklet to the toolbar), it works just fine in a completely different way.

So here's what you do next. When you come across an image that you'd like to pin (in this example, I'm going to pin an image from my blog), click Bookmarks at the bottom of the window. Note that you shouldn't open a new window - stay on the webpage with your chosen image, and just hit the Bookmarks icon.

Locate your Pinterest bookmark, and click it. This runs some nifty kind of magic on the webpage with your chosen image, and pulls out all the images into a grid. Select the image you want to pin, and click Pin This.   

You will then be taken to your Pinterest account, where you can add a category, description, and tags.

Freaking awesome, or what? It's hard to believe that I'm apparently the first person on Google to figure this one out (or perhaps more accurately the only person on Google who figured it out and wrote a blog post about it and uses a blogging provider who gets me into the top ten on Google for "Pinterest iPhone") but then again I'm spending large amounts of time awake at 1am, and 3am, and 5am... and therefore have plenty of time to mess around with various forms of online geekery.

Now, it's not a perfect solution. If you want to pin more than one image from the same page, you have to run the Pinterest bookmark every time. And sometimes you need to get the image onto its own page and then run Pinterest. And it doesn't work on Flickr. But I'm delighted to have figured out how to use Pinterest to pin images from the iPhone - Happy Christmas to me! Roll on the official app...

Happy pinning, peeps :-)

Strangely enough, I always found it necessary to fly over to Berlin and meet my colleagues for some very urgent face-to-face meetings in early December. 

And the fact that the hotel where I always stay is situated immediately opposite the prettiest Christmas market in Berlin? Completely unconnected, of course:-)

Welcome to Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt...

Viewed from above, it's a sea of pristine tents, each decorated with a single warmly glowing star, and presided over by a huge Christmas tree.

The shops (you can't really call them stalls) are immaculately edged with twinkling fairy lights, and draped with red and green fabrics.

Hungry? How about a sit-down meal in a heated restaurant, with fine china and waiter service...

Thirsty? How about a glass of bubbles (yes, that's a bottle of Veuve on the counter) or a warming mug of Gluhwein...

You can buy wooden toys:

As much cheese as you can stagger home with:

Nougat:

Fairy lights made from flowers and shells:

And beautiful wooden boards:

Yes, the Berlin Christmas markets are a thoroughly classy affair. Having said that, being a northener born and bred, I will always retain a soft spot for the Manchester Christmas markets, where if you don't come home soaked in beer, with a sore stomach from attempting to eat something from every single food stall, and an empty wallet from having paid £5 for a small bratwurst, then you're just Not Doing It Properly.

The park was covered in snow:

I wore my floral wellies:

Some creative locals made a tiny snowman with antler-like twigs and a rosebud for a nose:

The silver birch trees looked lovely and delicate against the blue December sky:

Who needs a Christmas garland on the front door when you have a natural red berry arch?

Back home, someone didn't want to put her bottom on the snow cos it was too cold:

(And someone else is too fluffy to care about a bit of the old frozen stuff):

Do you like to meander around your neighbourhood?

My favourite Parisian bistro salad with lovely soft poached eggs and lashings of smoked salmon was off the menu. So was my favourite breakfast, Eggs Benedict. 

I switched to de-caff Illy coffee (and didn't fancy having any lattes or cappuccinos at all).

I spent two gloriously sunny weeks in the land of cheese and wine, and did not have any cheese or wine. Or any pate. Or any raw steak.

I probably shouldn't have had any of these lemon tarts on account of how they're probably made with raw egg yolks, but I'd already eaten about twenty of them before this occurred to me, so I figured I might as well just keep on going.

I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking I'm pregnant, right?

Well, if I were pregnant, I guess I might look like this:

Actually, I don't look like that at all. I look like this:

Yes, the Simply The Nest family has been increased by one! Our beloved daughter was born on 1 September, and is now an adorable bundle of twelve week old baby girl. She has her Daddy's olive skin, dark hair and dark eyes, her Mummy's chubby cheeks, and is completely and utterly gorgeous.

So this should go some way to explaining my general lack of posting and twittering in recent weeks - I have been somewhat busy :-)

Lots of stories about nursery designing, activity mat sewing, and mural painting coming up!

First of all I sanded the cabinet, then I painted it, distressed it, and spray painted the tin storage boxes. All that remained was to add wooden handles (which I painted using the same bluey grey as the rustic desk in our home office): 

And to glue paper over the glass windows to hide the virulently coloured DVDs inside (I was going to use this part of the cabinet for decorative storage, but we cracked the grass screwing on new hinges so to salvage the situation I decided to paper over the damage):

We all like a nice before and after, yes? Here you go - six months of hard manual labour, and this delightful vision of loveliness:

Has been transformed into this:

The vases are from Habitat, the wooden bowl was a wedding present, and the blue and white ceramics are by Lee Page Hanson. The wooden lamp was made by my Granddad, and the photography on the wall (just seen) is by Neil Roland, and was my wedding present to Andre.

And what's inside the drawers? Why, vintage linen passed down from my Grandma, of course:

Blimey, it's nice to finally be able to post the after pics of this cabinet. What can I say, some DIY projects take a reeeeally long time (if one is, y'know, fairly to moderately lazy). Happy weekend, everyone!