Homely One House Tour – Bedrooms and Study

Thank you for all your kind birthday wishes on Friday. I had a lovely relaxing day, received some really beautiful gifts and had a nice time celebrating at night.

To avoid boring you and drawing out my Homely One House Tour too much longer, I’ve decided to group together several rooms. Today I thought I’d share a few photos of our bedrooms.

Our house has four bedrooms – our room, Grace’s, a spare room and one which we’ve made into a study. New carpet and new white skirtings are on our future list of plans for these rooms (we thought we’d hold off until Grace gets a bit bigger). In our study, we are going to paint the windowsill and built-in wardrobe door white as we did in the other bedrooms to brighten it up a bit. Here’s some photos of these rooms - I’ll post some shots of Grace’s room later on in the week in a separate post to show you the changes I’ve made in the nursery lately and I won’t show you our spare room yet because at the moment, it looks as though a bomb has gone off in there (it’s become my dumping room lately).

Birthday Bliss

Today is my birthday!! I am planning on spending it enjoying all my favourite things - relaxing by the river, drinking cups of tea, playing with Grace, browsing through interiors magazines and catching up on all your lovely blogs. Tonight we are having a little barbeque here with some family and friends to celebrate. Hope you all have a lovely end to the week...

Image from here

Homely One House Tour - The Living Room

Extending out from our kitchen and meals area is our living room. This is where we spend most of our time in our house (although with Grace crawling, our carpeted lounge is getting its fair share of use too). It has all been repainted (goodbye ‘Iced Peach’) and has also had the tiles replaced by floorboards.

We have the main pieces of furniture for this area but it is still looking very bare. The area around the TV is definitely lacking something, especially on the wall to the right of it where the laundry door is. Our rug also blends in too much with our sofas so will one day be replaced with something a bit lighter and perhaps with a bit of texture. At the moment, I’m keeping my eyes open for new cushions to give the sofas a bit of a freshen up – am still deciding on whether to go for neutral greys and whites or bright patterns for a burst of colour.

As for our unattractive gas heater, each winter we think it will be on its last legs, only to find it pulls through for another season. At the moment, it heats up the area beautifully, but eventually it will be replaced with something more ‘pleasing to the eye’ as I think there’s nothing like a fireplace as a focal point to create a cosy feeling in a living room.

What is the focal point of your living area?

Homely One House Tour – Entryway

Next up on my little House Tour is our entryway. At the moment, this area is very bare. The biggest change here has been removing our old ugly tiles and laying our floorboards. Also, this wall used to be ugly face brick so we had it rendered which made such an improvement (no before photos sorry). The artwork hanging above our hall table is a Helen Norton painting. We also have some black and white wedding photographs in our hallway and several other pieces by Etsy artists and local artists.

The items on the hall table are not going to stay there (I am not that bad at interior styling!!) - I just haven’t decided what is needed for this space to complement the painting. This feature wall is also not staying. Paul and I both agreed on the weekend that it does nothing for the painting and so we are thinking of changing it to the same colour as the other walls.

At present Paul is in the middle of painting the exterior of the front door. We are changing it from ugly cream to crisp white. However, we are unsure what colour to paint the side panel. We are trying to decide between white or the charcoal grey of the frames. I’m leaning more towards charcoal at the moment as I think the white may look too stark against the bricks. Would love your opinions. Here is a before shot and a partly completed shot…

Homely One House Tour - The Garden

Following on from last week’s post on the patio, I thought I’d continue the Homely One House Tour this week with our garden. Being on a corner block, we have quite a big yard and a lot of lawn. However, the lawn is Paul’s pride and joy so this doesn’t bother him one bit.

The only ‘before’ shot is the first one below which doesn’t really show a lot. However, we have made some big changes to our garden and much has grown in the five years we’ve been here. The corner garden you can see used to be a real hotch-potch of plants. We removed everything, extended the lawn to reduce the size of this garden bed and planted Iceberg roses down the driveway, a Poinciana tree (which will hopefully one day reach the 12 metre height and 10 metre width the tag says it will) and three Ornamental Plum Trees along the fence as a backdrop.

As for the backyard, lots has grown, lots has been removed and lots of new plants have been bought. Here’s a few photos …

Will be back indoors for the next House Tour post…