Bathroom gets some love (apart from the ugly storage bit)

The bathroom was in need of some love. 

It was looking a little cluttered and untidy around the edges.



















But the real motivation was the paintwork...











Hmmm. So it got a weekend transformation. The paint looks white in these photos, but it's a lovely shade of a white-that's-a-little-bit-green – a Dulux mix. 



I was shocked to discover that B&Q had stopped selling

Before & After: a dramatic transformation of the downstairs loo

Would anyone ever describe their house or flat as finished? 

Eight years after moving in, I'm finally getting around to painting that bit of bare plaster, tidying up those wonky shelves and changing various unsatisfactory light fittings.





And of course my tastes have changed since I first moved in, so there's a fresh round of updating too. So sometimes it's good to wait a while until you're

Before & after: Ikea mini drawer unit revamp

I've had these Ikea drawers so long that they no longer sell them (though they're in the ilk of the Moppe series). 

I put wheels on them back in the day, and thought often about painting them, just like the ones I overhauled in the bathroom – using odd old drawer knobs found on eBay and some white gloss paint. Years passed, procrastination flourished. Finally I have got around to fixing them up.

Kitchen table sorted?

You might have seen a post late last year about the kitchen table situation round my house. 

The kitchen looked as it does below, which looked OK, but when we had lots of family over for a Sunday lunch, and moved the table temporarily over to the bench so we could all fit in, it transformed the room dramatically. Made it feel nicer. And put us on a mission.





We tried out about 100 different

Real homes: my office makeover part II

I've had another office makeover. Only a little one. 

But it's amazing how much difference it's made moving the desk to the window. And I get a view! A very urban one, which I like a lot, and it has bonus trees. Here is how the office looked before...




I wrote about it in this previous post, where you can see the before before images with white walls and everything. And I also dug out some

Before & after: a mini makeover

It's amazing how different you can make a room feel with just a little rejigging. I've had the sideboard in the living room arranged like this for ages. But I've always felt that the print on the left, a piece I love by the artist Claire Scully, got slightly lost.



You'd be hard pushed to see that it depicts a giant squirrel climbing an urban tower block. The whole corner had also started

Before and after in Berlin

I like interiors. I like writing about them, looking at them and creating nice spaces to spend time in... in my own home, at least. Which was what I discovered when I agreed to help a friend do up his new flat in Berlin last year.

Because, oh my god. Doing someone else's interior – a friend's? In another city to the one you live in? Where you don't speak the language or know any of the shops?