Making It Yours Part One - Home Office

One of my 'daily read' blogs is Making It Lovely - I always enjoy spending time in Nicole's honeysuckle, beeswax and coral rose coloured world. One of my favourite features on this blog is 'Making it Yours', where Nicole follows one piece of furniture through several stages of an imagined life, and presents a mood board for each.

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 :-)

Banishing The Clutter

Over the past few months, I have been gradually (but sternly) banishing all the clutter from our casa. We didn't really have a lot of clutter in the first place (nothing like a two-bed semi for encouraging monastic tidiness), but the clutter that has escaped the general banishment has beaten a hasty retreat to this corner of the spare room:

"Have at you, clutter!", said I, and promptly hastened to Ikea to purchase yet more Expedit, which we assembled with the help of a very pretty assistant:

And then installed on top of the existing Expedit, so we now have a 6 x 9 floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall block of the lovely stuff:

Alice 1, Clutter 0.

Can you tell from my sporting reference that Engerlund just won a World Cup match? I am not exactly a football person myself, if truth be told, but there is some dude driving up and down our street right now honking his horn and bellowing Engerlund, so I figured they must have finally won something. Um, hurrah, I suppose!

So anyway, the final step is to make some kind of fitted cupboard in the corner and then the clutter Will Be No More. Muwahahaha!

Spot The Difference

Our spare room/home office looks onto the street, so we have muslin curtains at the windows to give a little more privacy, while still letting the light in.

I made them three years ago when we first moved in - they have been looking a little worse for wear - mostly due to Miss Penelope and Mr Enrique clawing at them when they try to get out of the window to greet the postman:

So I made new ones - can you tell which is which?

Shudder. That is one dirty set of curtains. And we wash them regularly as well, honest!

I also decided to brighten things up a little, so I sewed a strip of pom-pom trim to the bottom of each curtain, creating a scarlet streak that looks great against the deep blue:

And also balances nicely against the scarlet cushions on the sofa against the opposite wall:

Little changes like this please me :-)