7 Simple Christmas Styling Ideas For Festive Instagram Pictures

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‘Tis the season for…..doin’ it for the ‘gram! Chances are if you read my blog you are either one of two things (or both): an interior fanatic who loves changing things up at home and / or addicted to interiors on Instagram. There is nothing like a bit of festive inspo on Instagram when it comes to this time of year (although the vast amount of ‘Christmas In November’ on Insta this year has rightly had a few people shudder in horror.) This Christmas I was lucky enough to collaborate with House Of Fraser, styling a few of their Christmas collections in my home

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Giving My Kitchen A Facelift With The Karbon Single Lever Tap By Kohler

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Sometimes it is the simplest changes that can transform a room: a new cushion to refresh a living space or a new vase as a great focal point on an old table. Our kitchen at home is looking a bit tired, but we are years away from replacing it. Yet our kitchen tap was chipped, leaking and covered in ‘you’ll never be able to remove it in a million years’ limescale, so I decided I wanted to swap it out for something special and new to try and reinvigorate the area. Our old tap was a basic chrome bridge tap - so standard, so simple. If I was going to make an impact with a new tap then I wanted something really exceptional and individual, something that would draw attention as the ‘hero’ piece in the kitchen. Instantly, I thought I would want an instagramable polished brass tap, but as I have been working closely with bathroom & kitchen suppliers Kohler this year I was introduced to their very modern, very sexy Karbon single lever tap.

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DIY Advent Calendar Indoor Wreath

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I was recently commissioned by the chocolate company Green & Black’s to create some Instagram Christmas content with their Miniature Bar Collections. I decided to create an indoor wreath which also doubled up as a DIY advent calendar, as this way I was creating something decorative for the home as well as it having a function! This is the end result below, which I was quite happy with as it looked quite pretty and filled the house with the smell of eucalyptus.

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How To Easily Restore A Lacklustre Cast Iron Fireplace

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The cast-iron period fireplace in my kitchen had not been looking its best for a good while. The front of the fireplace had glimmers of rust (I’ve since found out you should never clean a fireplace with a wet rag or it will rust - who knew??) with the edges of the fireplace having a chalky white rust all around. Before I completely redecorated this space I needed to sort it out. It was suggested to me by a lot of people that I give the fireplace a coat of black metal paint, but I knew that would completely ruin the beautiful iron shine and make it look flat and inauthentic. Instead, I wanted to restore this fireplace properly, so I did quite a bit of research into how I could do that. I purchased the following products and hoped for the best, luckily the fireplace turned out better than I could have ever expected! This is why I want to share this on the blog today as I was so happy with the result and thought it might help others (this post is in no way sponsored, I purchased these items with my own money).

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My Dining Room Makeover With Sanderson Paint

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Room reveal posts are my favourite type of blog posts. I always love reading the before & after posts of other interior bloggers, while simultaneously they are my favourite posts to feature on my own blog. I’ve not had a room makeover post on the blog since the summer, so I’m delighted today to reveal my dining room transformation with iconic paint, fabric and wallpaper brand Sanderson.

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From Basic To Bespoke on a budget - How You Can Easily Transform An Ikea Kitchen

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I will forever bang-on about how paint can cheaply transform a room. Take a room and paint it a colour which really complements it and it will feel like a completely different space. However, what do you do when you need to transform or create a kitchen on a budget? It is not as easy as just painting the walls when there are the units to consider. This is why many of us now own or are tempted to install a kitchen from purse-friendly flat-pack giants IKEA. Base or wall units from IKEA can come in at less than £100 each, where as a made-to-measure kitchen will set you back thousands upon thousands of pounds (most of that money will be spent on crafting the carcass of the units - the bits you use but don't actually see). The problem here is that you end up with a budget-friendly but very plain, generic-looking kitchen.

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My Makeover Plans For The Dining Room

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It has been a few months since I’ve had a total room revamp in the house, so I’m delighted today to talk you through my plans for redecorating the dining room! The dining room, which is joined onto the kitchen, has needed some love for a while. The walls are stained, the skirting chipped and the ceiling has all these wipe marks on it after an incident with my young son and a glass of apple juice. When B&Q came to do some filming in my house a couple of months back, they wanted to paint a room in a vivid colour so I told them to use the dining room. The dining room then became a lovely blue shade, but as the room is in the basement of the house the colour was just too dark for the space (and yes I know I say to embrace dark rooms with dark colours but we use this room as a ‘doing’ room, I did not want to create a relaxing feel in here.) They also did not paint the ceiling or skirting for the filming, so this room was marked down as next in line for a complete decorating overhaul.

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Botanical ~ Botanica ~: The Stunning New Range Of Wallpapers From Cole & Son

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I was unable to attend London Design Festival last week, so instead I just devoured everyone else’s coverage of the event via social media. From all the exhibitions and product launches being covered there was one new collection that for me really stood out - the new Botanical ~Botanica~ papers by wallpaper leaders Cole & Son.

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How To Hang A Large Mirror

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For the past 6 months I’ve been completely obsessed with circular mirrors! I’ve replaced every non-circular mirror in my home with a circular one and I’ve loved the effect it creates in the room. The round shape is so pleasing on the eye and it feels a much more contemporary design to whatever I had there before. In my last blog post I talked about how circles in the bathroom are a trend that is here to stay, so I was delighted when online bathroom suite retailer Soak.com gifted me their Iris bathroom mirror to hang in my home.

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6 Bathroom Trends That Are Here To Stay & How You Can Create The Look In Your Own Home

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As we are now well over half-way through 2018, it is interesting to look back at the key trends predicted at the start of the year to see what has moved over from being seen as a 'trend', to cementing itself as a key way to successfully design your interior scheme. What on-trend design looks have moved away from being 'fashionable,' to now be seen as classic, sophisticated interior design? Today I want to delve into recently popular bathroom styes that I love and I think have longevity. I'm delighted to be collaborating on this post with bathroom specialists Kohler(who I also love!), looking to how you can create these gorgeous design schemes in your own home with their range of taps, sinks, baths and other fixtures and fittings.

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A Visit To Copenhagen To View The New Furniture Range From Umage (Formally Vita Copenhagen)

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If you don’t already have an iconic feather lampshade gracing a room in your home, chances are that you have pinned or screen-shotted at least one interior scheme featuring the Eos feather shade in recent months. The popular, unique design is the biggest seller for Danish design house Umage, who have recently undergone some major changes resulting in a complete rebrand of the company. The most considerable change has been their name - they’ve bravely got rid of their long-standing, well-known name of Vita Copenhagen and are now known as Umage, which means ‘extra effort’.

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Behind The Scenes On My Video for B&Q!

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If you had told me two years ago (when I started this interiors blog) that it would lead to me presenting some video content for B&Q to be hosted on the Mail Online, I would have laughed you out the door. Yet, a couple of weeks ago that is exactly what happened! A full film crew from The Mail rocked up at my house, and we spent the day filming a short video all about how the viewer can inject some colour into their home with a few selected products available to purchase at B&Q.

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How To Easily DIY Wall Panelling In Your Home

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In the first few months of starting this blog I attempted a little DIY of adding some home-made wall panelling over a damaged wall in my hallway. Fast-forward a couple of years and this blog post is still my most popular post ever. Even though I look back on the whole post (the terrible photography, the over-linking, not to mention the shoddy DIY job itself!) and cringe a bit, it points out that loads of you actually want to DIY wall panels in your own home, and are seeking out how to do it online.

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How To Choose A Modern And Contemporary Neutral-Coloured Carpet

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I definitely think we have moved away from being scared of bold, patterned wallpaper. As the dedicated House Of Hackney devotees flood Instagram with their wallpaper statements, it is now seen as something much more on-trend and desirable than something we associate with 'granny's house'. I don't think the same can be said about carpet. A heavily patterned, bold carpet choice is still something we flinch at and attach to a comedic period in interior-trend history, like avocado-coloured bathroom suites. I'm sure this will change going forward, yet for now, the neutral-coloured carpet is still king.

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Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Composite Deck With Trex Pro Installers & Landscapers The Greenkeeper

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So, our new composite deck is complete! Landscapers The Greenkeeper spent two weeks dismantling our rotten timber deck, building new framework and installing Trex deck boards and accompanying railing. If you missed the big reveal then you can find it here. If you want to see the build process then click here. Otherwise, I spent a lot of time chatting to The Greenkeeper during the deck build and it was a real eye-opener to how the innovative product of composite deck is revolutionising our exteriors. With its zero-maintenance appeal and eco-credentials, it is the perfect product for the time-poor consumer who would prefer to invest in sustainable materials within their home. I thought it would be interesting to do a Q&A with The Greenkeeper to find out all about how they came to be Trex Pro installers, and why they think that Trex is the future of decking, especially in the UK....

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DIY Kitchen Splashback With The Syren Tiles by Topps Tiles

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There are a few reasons as to why I decided to attempt a DIY kitchen splash-back, even though I had never tiled before in my entire life! The main and most obvious reason was of-course money. Our old cooker had died a very sad death the day before Christmas and we couldn't get one the same size, so we had to have someone come and cut away the worktop and a section of the units to fit in the wide new cooker. We then had to have a joiner in to re-build part of the base units once the installation was complete. The wall tiles also came a cropper as part of the switch-over, but I just did not have a spare £500 to give a professional tiler to come and sort that out aswell. Yet, another reason apart from money was that I had discovered the new Syren range of wall tiles by Topps Tiles.

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My Garden Overhaul: The Trex Transcend Composite Deck REVEAL!!!

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I am SO excited to finally reveal on the blog my brand new decking area, made from Trex Transcend Composite Decking and Trex Signature Railings. If you’ve been following our garden overhaul progress you will have seen why I had given up on our traditional timber deck, as well as a progress report of the build. This post is all about how the finished decking area now looks and how I have styled it so it is perfect for alfresco dinners and summer parties. So, without further delay, here are all the final photos of my finished raised decking area in my garden. As you can imagine, I am delighted with how it has turned out!

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Garden Progress Update: Replacing My Old Timber Deck With Trex Transcend Composite Decking

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Last week on the blog I talked about my big garden plans and how I had given up on our rotten, raised timber deck area of our garden. Instead, it was all going to be ripped out and replaced by something called Trex Transcend - a strong and durable composite decking made from 95% recycled materials. Well, as you can tell from the header image to this post (!!) the exciting news is that the big garden overhaul has begun! Landscape company The Greenkeeper arrived to dismantle and and re-lay the deck just over a week ago. After some initial framework problems, the actual installation of the Trex Deck was pretty interesting to watch. So, here is the build progress so far.....

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My Big Plans For The Garden Deck This Summer

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Hello and welcome to my garden! I have not featured the garden on my blog in a long time and with good reason - it is a disaster that I just cannot keep on top of. Well, not the garden itself but actually the decking area. We have a really large area of the garden that is raised decking, but the truth is the past couple of years it hasn't even been used - in fact I've actively cornered it off as I feel it is unsafe for the family.

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