BACK GARDEN: Outdoor dining ideas...

I love the idea of a section of the garden being like an outdoor dining room/ kitchen... below are my scrapbook of lovely ideas I have seen on this:

Love this too it's from the Frosts Garden Centre Magazine

Love these ideas from Making it Lovely:

This is from some European holiday photos, but I love the idea of a outdoor dining room with a brick built BBQ oven

Another lovely quote....

Another lovely quote featured on Belle Maison, so so true I just had to post...

“A home should be a distillation of your interests, of who you really are. If you’re happy with your life, your space will reflect that.”

— Designer Rafael de Cárdenas

BATHROOM: Gold wall & white wash...

We have a sloping wall in our bathroom above where I have placed the Edwardian cabinet. For whatever reason, my best guess is the previous people ran out of the art-ex they used round the rest of the room, they decided to line just this wall with textured paper. This has been gradually peeling off for weeks now and last weekend I had enough and decided to just rip it all off!

You can see in this picture the peeling wallpaper above the cabinet along with the stained walls

ripping progress...

 Eventually we want to put a Velux window in this wall as our neighbours have as it looks amazing but for now I think its an opportunity to do something a bit wacky with a relatively small space. My first thoughts were to paint it the same deep purple from our bedroom, as I had leftover paint, but then I was doing some artwork with some gold spray paint...

(just like this)

...and I just started to wonder how that would look as an option. I really liked how it caught the light and the more I thought about the idea the more excited I got. So I went ahead and got clearance from Adam, naturally, and once he OKed it I got to work. I filled all the holes with polly filla and then sanded best I could by hand (I knew a wouldn't get a perfectly smooth finish but I quite like the arty funky plaster effect anyway - it reminds me of being abroad on holiday!). I then when round the whole area lining the edges on all sides with about a foot of newspaper and masking tape...

Lining with Newpaper

Now we could get on to the fun bit - the spraying (unfortunately didn't take any pics whilst actually spraying - just immediately after)....

Pretty wacky I know - but I absolutely love the result.

And I even had enough paint left over to give an old shoe box/ storage box a make over...

So that was where we got up to yesterday...

Today I removed the newspaper, whitewashed all the white in the room, which really brightened it up, rearrange the furniture and gave the cabinet a good polish with special dark wood treatment, which has really brought it up lovely. And this is the final result....

And in candle light (though it is really hard to capture with the little cameras I have just how pretty this looks):

INSPIRING HOMES: FRIENDS HOMES: Laura & Adam

Laura is a good friend of mine and a real inspiration too. She owns a booming second hand/vintage shop in Wolverton, Milton Keynes called Boutique 73 (facebook, blog) and she lives in that area too.

Their house is a gorgeous Victorian 3 bed Terrace and inside it is a Laura Ashley Vintage dream!

I have categories the photos (Laura's own - don't worry - I did ask permission first) into rooms and spaces...hope you enjoy and find them as inspiring as I do...

Bedrooms:

Kitchen & Dining Room:

Utility Room:

Offices:

Living Room:

Bathroom:

Garden: