The Beginning of My Craft Room...

Welcome to the spare room, I mean my new craft room! :-)

This was previously our spare bedroom downstairs and thankfully it has not been affected by any of the two leaks we have had in other areas downstairs. It was 'semi' redecorated by the previous owners but still has original features too and needs some work to get it how we want it.

Although the colour is quite nice and neutral, I think we will be repainting down here eventually and also recarpeting. The current carpet is still in good condition but is a blue/grey colour which just doesn't fit with our furniture or style so one day I would like to replace it. I don't think it will be happening anytime soon but it is always good to have a plan. :-)

There isn't a lot in the room at the moment apart from my desk and some storage cubes which I am soon thinking of replacing with something smaller. On the positive side, it is a decent size room and should hopefully be a good space for me to spread my projects out and get creating.

I am looking forward to adding some colour and life to this otherwise dull space. Wish me luck!

Craft Room Inspiration:Part Two

Are you ready for more craft room inspiration? :-)

I think the great thing about a craft room is that you can be a bit braver with colour and accessories. I am trying to become a bit more colour confident but I don't know if I am quite ready for bright coloured walls yet.

I am a fan of order and these rooms are beautifully organised and everything appears to have its own place, essential if you are sewing or crafting. I can't tell you how many times I have had to go searching for a spare bobbin or my quick unpick.  

I love how the storage in these rooms almost looks like art with all the colours and shapes.

I have come to the conclusion that creative spaces don't have to be big. It may be a corner of your dining room table, but as long as it is an area that inspires you, then it will do the trick.

I love the way that the owners of these rooms have thought outside the box in terms of storage.

Whether it be cupcake stands, old glass jars or rusty muffin trays, everything looks a dream.

I hope you have enjoyed some of these fantastic rooms as much as I have. Tomorrow, if I am brave enough, I will share some photos of my craft room in it's current state. :-)

Craft Room Inspiration:Part One

Given that I have rediscovered my love for sewing in recent days, I have decided that I need to work on making my craft room more inspiring.

 I have never had a dedicated room for sewing before and yet when we moved to this house, I never really got myself organised to set one up.

My machines were always plonked amongst other things and as a result, I rarely ventured downstairs to use them. :-)

We are lucky enough to have quite a bit of spare space downstairs so I have now dedicated one of the bedrooms to my craft room.

I have been so inspired by these photos of what others have done with their creative spaces, that I had to share some of them. They are totally beautiful!

I just love the way everything is organised and sorted and I recognise quite a few pieces from Ikea. I so wish we had affordable storage options here in NZ.

I hope you have enjoyed these gorgeous rooms and I will be sharing more with you tomorrow. :-)

My New Vintage Sanderson Cushions

I have been sewing again...finally. I just haven't felt the inspiration to sew in the last few months so many of my ideas have been put on hold for a while. During the school holidays I found a roll of vintage Sanderson fabric in the roof of Mum and Dad's garage and all of a sudden I felt the urge to create! Mum bought this roll of fabric 25 years ago for a project which never eventuated and I was thrilled to put some of it to use.

I grew up with a Mum who loved antiques and rarely bought new furniture. She believed that older furniture had stood the test of time and would continue to do so in the future. Our sofa was 50+ years old and had several coverings in it's time in our house. My sister and I had beautiful hand carved beds in French Provincial style with all the matching furniture. We grew up in Melbourne and on many an occasion we tagged along to antique shops. I really didn't appreciate it at the time but now that I have discovered a love of classic design, I really do!

I decided to make a couple of feature cushions for our bed. I love the retro colours in the fabric and the texture of the fabric is divine. The linen, yellow, green and soft aqua are a great combination and I was even able to use two vintage zips in my covers. The secret to a great cushion is the inner...it has to be feather. Poly inners are very quick to lose their "bounce" and go flat, where as feather inners stay plump for ages. My new "old" cushions deserved new feathers inners. :-)

I was really happy with how they turned out and Mum and Dad enjoyed seeing the fabric being put to use. Finishing these two cushions has inspired me to start making the effort to be a bit more creative in my spare time. The feeling of creating or sewing something new just can't be topped!

As for my cushions, if I had my way I would track down a copy of Tretchikoff's Chinese Girl to go on our wall. These once common prints are so popular and always end up going for loads so at this stage I think my cushions will need to be the star of the show. :-)

Pool Doctor's Magic

Some of you may remember my post a few weeks ago about our Coca Cola coloured pool. There was some kind of strange reaction with the sawdust from our Pepper Tree and the pool water. Taff did his utmost to try and fix the problem but unfortunately it was beyond our realm of expertise, we needed to call in the Pool Doctor.

The Pool Doctor has worked his magic and the pool is finally blue again

He came and did a site visit and said that the pool would need to be emptied and the sides given a chemical wash to try and remove the staining. Only then could he get a more accurate picture of the problem. We decided to give him the go ahead as there really wasn't anything else we could do in the situation.

 Coca Cola pool

Imagine our surprise to come home after his first treatment visit to find a blue pool again! Yes, it was still quite murky but blue nonetheless. The pool obviously hadn't been emptied and after calling him we learnt that he had just put a whole lot of chemicals in there. We were thrilled that our pool wasn't permanently stained and after two more visits, he had it back to a perfect chemical balance and all ready to swim in.

Pool after the first treatment...much improved but still in need of a little work.

Of course, this doesn't mean any of us are brave enough to swim in it yet, it is still way too cold for that! Still, it is nice to look out and see a crystal clear blue pool again rather than a pool full of Coca Cola! :-)

Breadmaker Foccacia Recipe

I absolutely love my breadmaker so I thought I would share one of my favourite recipes. There is nothing like the smell of fresh bread and the breadmaker makes it all so easy. I don't use it very often to cook full loaves, I mainly use it for making dough which I then shape and cook in the oven. The most popular recipe in our house is for foccacia bread. This recipe can be adapted in so many ways and is delicious.

Breadmaker Foccacia Bread

• 2 teaspoons Surebake yeast
• 3 cups high grade flour
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon milk powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 300mls water

Set the breadmaker to the dough cycle. After the cycle is complete, shape it into a large flat loaf (or two smaller loaves). Create dimples in the top by pressing your finger into the dough every few centimetres. Leave to rise in a warm place for 30 minutes if possible.

Combine the following ingredients and brush evenly over the surface of the dough:

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon dried basil
• 1 teaspoon dried rosemary
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme

Bake at 200 degrees celcius for 20-25 minutes. Cut it into pieces, pop it in a basket (I got mine from Storage Box) and enjoy!

Sylvia Road Front Gardens

We have finally come to the end of the Sylvia series and there is a lot to share in this last post!

This house had very little street appeal so the last thing on our list was to finish the gardens and do a few things to make it look a bit more attractive from the front.

The wow factor of the property was its huge lawn at the front of the house. For a long time this was completely exposed to the road as there was no fence and this meant that I couldn't leave Rosie and Harry to play by themselves outside in case they ran onto the road.

We had quite a bit of clearing to do in the front gardens and also a large tree to chop down. We held off on this as before the fence, it was our only privacy from the street!

While Karen was up she decided that there was no need to call in the specialists to cut down the tree, she offered to do it herself! We did it while Taff was at work one day so he came home and the tree was gone.

 

I must mention that she chopped the whole lot down with a hand saw too! I was very impressed. :-)

After we had cleared the gardens we replicated the same look as we did out the back.

That included laying weedmat, lime chips and pavers.

Luckily we were able to back the trailer right up to the front of the house and dump all the lime chip outside the garage so we didn't need to move it far to cover the garden.

We then found these great large green pots for a bargain price at Bunnings and after putting some modern plants in, we were done. The best thing about this was that we were able to take them with us when we moved!

The fence was a great success and totally transformed the way we lived and our enjoyment of the house. By having a safe place for the kids to play, they were able to get outside as much as they wanted and we had a lot of great times on our front lawn. We loved having family running races from the fence to the house, this was always a favourite activity with the kids.

When it was first built it was a huge expanse of plain raw pine and was not very attractive at all. Taff likened it to a prison fence but I wouldn't have taken it that far! I had the builders make a gate from a photo of one I had admired up the road and they did such a fantastic job. To try and improve it's appearance, Taff sanded (he is so patient) the fence and sprayed it a dark charcoal on both sides. It looked a thousand times better once it was done and although we did it very inexpensively (we found the builder on Trademe) we feel that it was one of the things that added the most value to the house and really finished it off.

We spent a LOT of time (and not a lot of money actually) on this house and were working on it literally up to two minutes before the first open home. As we were selling it in the recession (2009 wasn't a great time to sell), we needed to make it the best we possibly could to try and get a sale.

We were blessed with an overwhelming response to our little house and people were lining up for the open home 45 minutes before it started. We had also taken to locking our gate in the days prior as people were walking off the street and trying to get us to let them in for a look. After one weekend of open homes we had 10 offers and the house was sold. We could then start looking for our new place!

Despite the challenges of this property I am very grateful we bought it and had the experience of working on it. We learnt so much and it has helped us to appreciate the little things at our new house...like a laundry which isn't one metre away from my kitchen sink! lol.

Back to normal blogging from tomorrow. :-)

Sylvia Road Backyard and Sleepout

Welcome to the sleepout! This room was a rough old toolshed in it's former life and was truly awful. It had mint green walls, built in tool benches and shelves and a rough concrete floor. Due to the lack of space inside the house, we decided to convert it into a useable space by getting power connected out there and a phone line installed. Taff replastered all the imperfections in the walls and repainted it to match the interior of the main house. We also had the carpet installed to make it a more cosy space.

The sleepout was Dad's bedroom during the week while he was working in Auckland and we also used it as an office and sewing room (all my machines were hidden in the brown cabinet and my fabrics were kept in the white chest of drawers). There was even a TV in there! We actually got a lot of use out of this room and fortunately when we came to sell the house, it was a really popular selling feature for potential buyers.

The backyard gardens were also in a real state and they had to wait a long time before achieving any of our attention. :-) I am not the greatest gardener so I knew we needed something low maintenance. I knew the look that I was wanting to achieve but needed Karen's help to put that plan into action.

She came up for a few days and we dedicated this time to getting all the gardens sorted. It was a lot of hard work but it was one of the most fun house projects I have ever done. I loved it! We cleared out all the weeds from the garden and got rid of a lot of excess soil and levelled the garden bed.

We then put down weed mat and wheelbarrowed in lime chip for a modern clean look. To add a bit of interest we sourced some contrasting charcoal paving stones to be the platform for our large pots.

I was also looking for a tidy solution for all the outdoor toys we had so I picked up this washing basket from Storage Box and it worked really well to keep the toys from being strewn across the lawn.

When we first arrived here, a large portion of the backyard was a vegetable garden, the pride and joy of it's previous owners. Sadly, it wasn't practical for us to keep it so Taff levelled it all out and laid new grass seed.

Once the new lawn was established, we used the area to keep the trampoline on and Rosie and Harry spent a lot of time out there in the summer.

About 18 months after we moved in, the daughter of the previous owner (she was in her 60's) came to my back door and asked if she could take a cutting of the rose bush that was by the tool shed, now a sleepout! I was so sad to tell her that it had been cut down about 6 months prior to this, although I didn't tell her that it was essentially dead anyway and no longer producing flowers. She really mourned the loss of her parents and this house was the closest thing she had to remind her of them.

On Fridays she would drive to the Shore to visit their graves and would often park outside our house for a while and just look in. I often wondered what they would think of the changes we made to the house and whether they would be happy. We hoped so. :-)

Tomorrow is the last post in the Sylvia series and I will finish with the work we did on the front gardens.

Sylvia Road Kitchen, Dining Area and Laundry

This room was perhaps the most challenging part of living at Sylvia Road. It was our kitchen, dining room and laundry, all in one room. The floor was originally covered in brown vinyl and we had to use a heat gun to remove it all. There were old purple plastic blinds on the windows and there was an ancient benchtop with a built in, pull out chopping board complete with food scraps still embedded on it!

Given the market slump at that time, we couldn't really afford to make any major changes with the kitchen. We ended up repainting the old cabinetry white and replacing the handles and kitchen sink. That was virtually it. There was literally only a small section of the bench to use for food preparation and ridiculously high cupboards which required a chair to reach. It really was a challenge to use and I never felt motivated to cook in there. On the plus side, having such a bad kitchen there has really made me appreciate my current kitchen!

We bought an inexpensive cupboard from Bunnings to add some extra storage but this meant that the fridge had to move to the laundry end. There was definitely no 'working triangle' in this space! lol. One of the major difficulties was doing the laundry in this shared space. I was a cloth nappy Mum (loved using them!) and I hated doing nappy loads at the same time as food prep. It just felt wrong! :-)

In the end, we made it work for our family and although it was a space that had it's challenges, it also had potential. Perhaps the new owners will realise that potential in their time there. :-)

We are nearing the end of the Sylvia series, tomorrow I will share the work we did in the backyard and sleepout.