The Green Room

As the decision has most finally been made that my niece will not be coming back to live with us we have decided to turn her old bedroom back into a room we can use.  It is only a little room but we decided to keep a bed in here to be a guest room (which is a good job as it has been used already). My husband suggested that it would be good to let the children keep their musical instruments and stands up in this room to encourage them to play a little more often (their rooms are not very big either).  I rather fancied being able to have somewhere to sit and be quiet.  The result is - The Green Room.

The walls have been painted Dulux Putting Green, it took two coats of paint, but we only used a small tin :o).

The mirror was already in situ.  The two little white wooden shelves are from Ikea

The chair was a bargain buy from ikea for just £40.00 it is cream and so I have covered it with a throw which will hopefully help it to wear a little better.  All the pictures we already have, the three on the same wall are cross stitch embroideries that I did in the early 1990's.  The iris picture was made by my sister and given to us as a present in 2004.

The little bedside table was another good purchase for just under £40.00, the lamp was £5.00 these were both from The Range.  The lovely little green glass candle holders were £1.00 from ikea and I already had the beautiful holding cross lying on the table.

One of my favourite things in this room are the curtains and the bedcover.  These have been in storage for 12 years!  I made them for a little room we had in our first house.  I had completely forgotten I had made three curtains and it took some thinking to remember where the third one went - it was over the door as the door had glass panels to lighten up an otherwise very dark hallway.  This is perfect as the extra curtain works great as a bedcover over the top of the bedding so that does not get grubby from the children using the room to play their music.  We purchased the wooden curtain pole for £15.00, the lightshade from the Fairtrade Shop which is local to us for £10.00 and three cushions from the Range to give the bed that bit more of a comfy look.

This is my one real extravagance for the room, I saw it and just could not resist, it was not very expensive and I think it just adds that last little something to what has become a very peace filled room.

The extra advantage of making this room so cosy and peaceful is that it is always a place where I know I can always go and pray for my niece, feeling extra close to her, as it was the room where she laid her head for 2 whole years.

Blogging on Bogs!

Finally our downstairs cloakroom has been decorated! We have now been in our house for 7 and a half years and this is the final room to be decorated. There is a reason we were leaving it. We had grand plans drawn up when we moved here and planning permission gained to put and extension on the house which would have meant this room would have been moved. When we had the kitchen done some 5 years ago we had plumbing put into the Garage which is behind the wall you can see in the photos. This meant they had to take the sink off, I took that opportunity to go and buy a new sink knowing we would eventually want a while suite. It now feels as though we have given up on our planned extension - having had to buy another new car there is not likely to be any money available for a very long time.

We have therefore got it decorated.

We have done it all ourselves, I even managed to lay the tiled floor without being able to get on my knees - quite proud of that! The towel rail on the bottom of the cabinet means that the kids no longer try and shove it behind the radiator every time they have finished with it. The mirror is from here , the cabinet is from Ikea. The poster on the wall of the UK is hopefully going to get some information absorbed into my children's head while they go about their business! The blind means the neighbours no longer have to watch our shadowy figures now the evenings are so dark.

It may be just a downstairs loo - but I am really loving having it looking nice.

Changing Rooms.

We have had a tough weekend. Fortunately there have been a few light moments but I certainly feel as though I could have done with a few more.



There has been a lot of physical changes in our home since my 12 yr old niece came to live with us. Our spare room no longer exists, so we have had to have new units downstairs to house bits and pieces that belonged to myself and my husband which were in there (not quite completed this stage as there are still two boxes of books on our bedroom floor). This room has now been decorated and new furnishings put into (except for bed).



My sons old room is now my nieces room. It has been cleared except for my sons old bed, the clothes rail in the built in wardrobe has been placed higher. The first coat of colour has gone on - it's very red! Her white high bed has been purchased with a desk and storage under it, hopefully it should arrive in the next two weeks. Once that is in we can properly assess how much more storage is required, we do have a nice set of black shelves from the old 'spare' room which we can get some rather funky glass doors to go on, but don't know whether that much will be required yet - a lot of her stuff is still at my parents place.



The demise of the 'spare' room also means that I have had to halve my wardrobe so that I can share it with my husband - he used the 'spare' one before that.



Today we are trying out a new 'system' for the laundry. It seems my darling little niece has quite an issue about putting stuff away properly (I know she's almost a teenager and that is what they do!) - especially dirty clothes. As small and petty as it might seem it has really got me in a stew. I am a stickler for only washing once or at the most twice a week. I have found that this means stuff doesn't get put in the wash unless it really needs to go in it. It also means that when putting lovely fresh clean clothes on the washing line I can see exactly what has been worn (or not!). This is how I have discovered the disappearing act that most of my nieces clothes seem to do. So the system that I have used for the last 13 + years of my married and family life is going (at least for a trial period). The washing baskets we used, one for whites, one for light colours, one for dark colours, were always kept in my wardrobe. Maybe the trip to our room was just too far?????? So my husband has come up with the idea of using a chest that used to live in the 'spare' room but which up until today has had no home. This is going to be kept on the landing (between all the rooms).



I have no idea if any of these changes is going to work well, they have taken an awful lot of energy and thought. It has reconfirmed to me the importance of not getting too attached to 'stuff' or 'systems', but as with all change it really is not easy.

Begrudgingly Resentful

I love words, scrabble is my most favourite game to play. Words do not however come that easily to me, I lose them, forget them and very often cannot spell them. Coming from a family full of people with dyslexia I think I have come off very lightly.

Since reading a blog by Katharine on her tendency to be critical http://www.10minutewriter.com/?p=346 I have had the words Begrudge and Resent going round and round in my head. Today I have at last found a few minutes when I have been motivated to go and get out my husbands very large Chambers English Dictionary to look these words up, this is what I found:

Begrudge - to grudge, Grudge - to envy, to give or allow unwillingly; to resent; to murmur at - to murmur, to show discontent, an old cause of quarrel or resentment; a feeling of enmity or envy.

Resent - to take in, consider as an injury or affront; to feel joy or sorrow because of; to receive, well or badly, to savour.

Now that I have looked them up I would much rather say that I am a resentful person rather than a Begrudging one. However I have to be honest and say that it is very much the other way round for me at the moment.

What started this feeling for me this week - a bed. How silly does that sound. Let me explain, having recently had a 12 year old addition to our family we have been having to do lots of smoothing and reassuring to our two birth children who are 8 and 9 years old. The 8 year old has required the most attention in this department possibly due to being the same sex as the 12 year old (female!).

A few weeks ago we had a conversation where she explained that having an older girl in the family made her feel even younger and so we brainstormed some ideas on how we could make her feel a little more grown up. The result was a decision was made to purchase her a bed with a desk under it so that she had her own space for doing her crafty bits and pieces - and writing. Up until now she has had a small table in our living/dining room where she has done these types of activity.

The bed was purchased and I felt reasonably okay that we had reached a good solution to this immediate problem and our intention had always been to get this sort of bed for our two small children's rooms eventually anyway.

It was not until the bed arrived by courier (flat packed for us to make) on Monday afternoon that it's reality really started to dawn on me. As I tucked my daughter into bed on Tuesday evening I knew that this was going to be the last time that I could easily see her sleeping before I went to bed.

That's when the Begrudging really took hold. I did not feel ready for her to grow up. The reality is that I really have not had any control over the circumstances that have brought an extra child into our house. Yes we have made the decision to do what we are doing but I have to admit it is more because we could not face the consequences of us making any other decision.

So having a grudge is not going to help me or my family, so I shall ask God to replace it with Grace and I shall wait expectantly for him to give me that.

ps. My daughter loves her new bed as you can see from the photos!

Our New Shed.

There seems to be something decidedly middle aged about getting excited about a shed. This is the shed that my husband and I promised each other for our 13th wedding anniversary last week. (Though he cheated and got me the most fantastic picture).


When my dad brought my niece down t0 us last weekend, he helped me to decide which was the best (and cheapest) for me to purchase. A few days later I had the conversation with my husband and we decided on the size and I bought it on-line. To pay someone to erect it would have cost more than the shed again so we decided we would have a go ourselves.

Now it has to be said, I love flat pack furniture, I get a great buzz out of making it and can usually do it despite the weak joints. I was not however terribly confident about getting a cheap shed together.


It arrived a couple of days later last Friday and with the children all very keen to help we decided to start it when my husband came home from work later that afternoon. First we set about painting the side that was going to be up against the fence.

While this was being done we got the door fitted in (though it had to be taken off again and refitted once we had erected it - bah!).
Then the excitement began of putting it together.
By 7.30pm we had got this far and though we couldn't shut the door it was starting to look like a shed.
Saturday my husband was working an early shift, so I devised an extra pocket money option for the children and they all took part in painting the rest of the shed. While I refitted the door and started to cut the glazing (they had delivered the wrong size and thought it would be quicker to just cut it myself than wait for new stuff).
As we were out for the afternoon and evening on Saturday we down tooled, but took them up again Sunday morning (we skived on church - naughty naughty) to get the roof on. Rain was forecast for Monday so I was quite keen to get this done. It is not quite finished just have the facings to put on the roof at the front and back but it is up, stable and water tight.


We managed to get all this done with hardly a strong word said - no easy thing for darling husband and I when it comes to DIY. I am hoping that this is further testament for us both that the extra effort we are putting into communicating with each other through the challenges we are presently facing, is well worth it - horrah!