My Interior Edits
What paint colour is the living room? What colour have you painted the kitchen cabinets? What colour is the bookcase?
These are just a few of the questions I receive about paint colours in our home so I thought it would be helpful to share the updated colour schemes in each of our rooms. Buckle up, and get a notebook because there are many!
If you’ve been following me for a while you will know that I love a mustardy burnt yellow. From the nursery in our old home, to the ceiling of the guest room in our current home and the exterior windows and doors as well, it’s a colour I’ve never strayed too far from.
Mustard tones seemed to be everywhere from clothing and sofas, to cushions and accessories, but now I am seeing a new, more buttery yellow popping up and I am not mad about it. Its soft warm tones are maybe slightly harder to perfect than the mustard - get it too light and it may look magnolia, or too bright and it verges on primary school toilets - but done just right, it can look wonderful.
First up let’s get things straight. I hate camping. There I said it. It makes no sense to me to make life harder on a ‘holiday’, but for many many years it’s been all we can afford, the kids LOVE it, our friends love it, so it’s what we do! It’s what I grew up doing and what we’ve done every summer since having children.
In this sense though I feel I am well qualified to give out packing tips. We have friends who love it so much they’re like, ‘Oh, its fine, just a tent and a sleeping bag and a pocket knife and you’ll hAvE tHe BeSt TiMe.’ I wish on every level I could be this carefree but the reality is, that just ain’t me.
As the housing market remains stagnant and rent and interest rates high, moving home or upsizing has never felt so unappealing (and that’s coming from someone who loves moving house!) So it’s not surprising that we are all looking for ways to maximize the space we already have. With the cost of materials and labour for extensions also high at the moment, if you’re looking for extra room in your home - it’s time to start thinking outside the box, looking towards your garden and how you can make your outdoor space work harder to meet your needs.
I recently came across a bedside table that I can’t stop thinking about. I find good bedside tables hard to find and this one ticked all the boxes for me - solid wood, drawers to hide clutter, pretty handles and a scallop edge - however, it costs a cool £1295 which is totally out of my budget.
In fact, the two bedside tables we have in our bedroom were £10 from a charity shop at the tip and the other free from Facebook Marketplace.
If you haven’t had any success with second hand (and I know it can be particularly hard if you’re after a pair of tables,) then here are my top picks from the high street which are, thankfully, closer to budget than the dream piece. Maybe that will be one to recreate in the future with an upcycle, but for now it will just be saved away under ‘one day’.
If you’ve followed me a while you’ll know I am multifaceted - as we all are - and therefore my account reflects that. Whilst the algorithm may reward you for sticking to a niche and I for one ensure 99% of my content is interiors and diy based, there are some things that are too important not to speak out about.
If you’re a lover of interiors and diy inspiration but also have a heart for something more substantial too, here are my top recommendations for other Instagram accounts to follow.
Looking for kid’s bedding sets is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack… there are some gorgeous sets out there but you have to search few a lot of Barbie and Marvel characters to get there. So let me save you time and share my top 15 single duvet covers from as little as £11.
Post contains affiliate links. Prices are accurate as of date published - 30th January 2023.
On moving day, when I first realised we had a pull-out larder, I was so excited about it, I sent a picture of it to a friend’s house reno group I have on WhatsApp! Little did I know, that I would actually come to hate it, as it always got stuck, the kids couldn’t open or close it by themselves it was so heavy, and it was difficult to see what food items we actually had in stock. Not to mention the shelves were made from metal racking so smaller items didn’t sit straight and things fell through to the shelves below.
Cushions are great for bringing new life to an old sofa and a pop of colour or pattern to your room on a smaller, more manageable scale. I love mixing high street finds with covers from independent sellers, and when I have the time, I’ll even make my own, using fabric from old dresses, bedlinen or spare scraps I have saved in my fabric stash.
If making your own isn’t for you, here are some of my recent cushion finds under £20:
Obviously it goes without saying that I would happily sleep on a sofa with a blanket if that was required, and I would never expect anyone to have the perfect guest room set up ready when hosting me. In fact, nearly all my family and friends do not have a guest room readily available and that is, I expect, more the norm than the exception!
However, for those lucky enough to have a spare room that they can keep as a guest room, here are a few ideas on how you can make it a welcoming space for all.
Our third renovation and it’s definitely the most curated set of colours I’ve used yet. The more you make a home for yourself, the more you realise which colours you love time and time again and the tones or hues you’re naturally drawn to.
I don’t see any reason in changing things for changing sake so I’ve also used colours we had in our previous homes too. There’s nothing more satisfying than using up an old pot of paint for a cheap DIY project!
Want to win a £400 voucher for the Cotswold Company? Read on to find out how...Whilst we are all spending a lot of time in our homes lately, I am sure many of you are noticing new areas that aren't working so well, or wanting to finish corners that have been ignored for too long. As we all live, work and play in one space, the walls can feel like they are creeping in on us and extra work items or home schooling resources are highlighting a need for more storage and better organisation.
Naff. That was the first thought in my mind when I came across tile stickers.But then we moved to this house with a lime green kitchen and my opinion began to change. I knew we needed to come up with a quick and cheap solution so we could transform it (or at the very least, make it 'liveable') before all the major building works began.You can find tile stickers on eBay and Amazon, but after heaps of searching, we personally struck gold with moonwallstickers.com. It's an unassuming website, with limited and rather uninspiring social media activity but, my oh my, some of the tile stickers on there are gorgeous! (This is NOT an ad by the way!) There are also multiple size options available for every design making it compatible with the tiles you already have.
Do you love stylish interiors but also have kids? Do you know they can actually be compatible together?!Sometimes it's just a case of seeing how others do it, to inspire you to do the same. What hacks do they use? How do they make the shared room for the kids work both practically and aesthetically? Where the heck do they put all the ugly toys?!That's why Coral Atkinson (@coral.atkinson, founder and creator behind the beautiful Velveteen Babies) and I (@theottohouse), have decided to start a new hashtag challenge which we hope will encourage people to share, and be inspired by, stylish and creatively decorated homes which have our family lives at the centre. Our homes may not always look straight out of a magazine but they do have life to the fullest enjoying every inch of them. You will be able to find all this inspiration under the hashtag #ourkidslivehere and you can add your own pictures to the feed too by popping the hashtag in the caption underneath your picture. We would love you to feel free to include your kids in these pictures if you like, but without them is totally fine too (we don't want anyone 'styling' their kids into a shot just for Instagram!) We will share our favourites on our Instagram stories and, at the end of each month, our favourite picture will win an amazing prize from an incredible independent interiors based brand! So, be sure to follow both our accounts so you don't miss out on the news including which fabulous prizes we have coming up!
DISCLAIMER: These bunk beds were purchased by myself, with 50% off, in exchange for an honest blog post and pictures of the product. This is the first time I have collaborated on something like this so do let me know what you think and please ask me any questions you have about the bunk beds - all thoughts and words are, and always will be, my own!As our youngest daughter began to outgrow her cot, it felt natural to look towards bunk beds as a solution for our girls' shared bedroom. Not to mention our eldest daughter has been asking for them for a while now, and kept telling people, 'when we move to the big house, we're going to have bunk beds and I'm going to sleep on the top and Betty will sleep on the bottom...' I'm not entirely sure where she got that idea from as we never promised anything specifically, but our hope was to have bunk beds set up in the new house as a surprise when they arrived.Anyway, as regular readers of this blog will know, the house sale fell through at the last minute so we're still in our old house for the moment (you can read what happened here), but babies carry on growing, and cots don't grow with them, so we decided to find a new solution even if it meant building new bunk beds that we'd have to dismantle a few months later.Due to our youngest being only 20 months old, we were keen to get a bed with the bottom bunk bed close to the ground, which this house bunk bed from House About Kids does perfectly. The ladder is also on a slant, has handles and wide steps, which is perfect for our girls who aren't as physically confident as other kids their age. In fact, we visited a friends house at the weekend who have the Ikea Kura Bunk (another serious contender for us) but Darcey struggled to go up and down the ladder so I'm glad we didn't go for that one just yet. As the years pass, I also think this bed has plenty of room to reinvent itself . I'm looking forward to making sweeping canopy's, hanging plants, adding greenery and more fairy lights, maybe curtains of some sort for the bottom bunk, I could go on...! (**insert husband rolling eyeballs here**)
Following on from my blog post last week about what to expect when buying furniture at auctions, here are some very important tips you should know before embarking on your bargain shopping spree at your local auction house...Measure up! I have a little notebook I take around with me everywhere with all the important dimensions of our home in. You never know what you're gonna find on that day, so although you might go in thinking, I need a desk that is 'xyz', you may get there and find a gorgeous mirror and end up wondering what the heck is the distance between 'abc' instead. I asked, Catherine Hockley, director of our local auction house, Andrew Smith & Son, to share some tips on finding something that is the right fit for you: "Our salerooms are very large and so some items look small in them - always bring a tape measure, or borrow one from us, and make sure that the item you are bidding on will fit through your door or up your stairs."She also goes on to say, "Check the condition well before you buy, for wobbly legs or sticking drawers etc. Most things can be easily mended, but make sure it is within your capabilities or you will end up paying for restoration."
Does anyone else love those kinda interior articles where they pick an expensive 'investment piece' and then source a budget option that is often very similar? I love it when magazines and bloggers try to make their content accessible to people like us who have a realistic budget and can't blow the families' winter shoes and coat budget on a new lamp.Sometimes I find myself getting frustrated though, because even the 'budget option' makes my debit card quiver with anxiety, which, all things considered, is a bit unfair on the author really. Everything is relative and they can't please everyone. I'm sure spending £179 on a coffee table IS a budget option for someone, and, in a similar vein, when I suggest spending £40 on a coffee table as a bargain, others may disagree with me too.With that in mind though, I'd love to let you know about some of our own resources for spending less money as well as sharing a few of our mistakes so you can learn from them...
I can honestly say it's the best £1000 we've ever spent. We've never had a huge budget for doing up this house, but to spend 1/6 of that on getting rid of the old UPVC door and transforming our homes curb appeal was definitely the best decision we ever made. I absolutely hated our old door, and I hate to admit I'm this shallow, but it genuinely made me feel embarrassed about the house. We'd worked so hard on transforming the interiors, but 95% of people only ever saw that horrible plastic white thing more akin to a static caravan home than a Victorian cottage in the beautiful South Downs National Park. I remember our first Christmas in the village, taking Darcey for a little walk in the pram to get some fresh air and coming home to Matt exclaiming 'I swear we have the only UPVC door in the WHOLE village, everyone has beautiful Christmas wreaths on their beautiful Farrow and Ball doors and ours is just BLEURGH!!!' (You may come to realise I'm never one to understate my feelings...)
It was definitely at the point where we had to strip the wall in the girls room right back to the original wood when I thought we were never going to achieve our three week deadline. It was also the moment where I sent an urgent plea out to good friends requesting help with the decorating. Quick!!! Darcey has to sleep in this room in 8 days!!! PLEASE help. Emotive? Guilty. Using a baby to get you free labour? Guilty. Desperate? Hell to the YES.Due to previous damage and decay we had to strip this wall right back and our plasterers boarded it up for us and re-plastered. It was an unexpected and unwelcome job but it had to be done and at least it gave us a bag full of wood perfect for kinder on the fire?! (Essential to clasp onto any positives you can whilst going through a renovation I think!)
Before we bought 'The Otto House' we rented a large, detached three-bedroom house with an enormous studio in the garden. Like many here in the South of England we had to downsize to get on the property ladder so storage has always been a bit of an ongoing challenge. I am a curtain-maker by trade and not only used the old garden studio for making curtains but also for hoarding HEAPS of fabric, wallpaper, paint, magazines, books and anything else remotely crafty. It was like a creative paradise to me and something which I am sure I will never have again, but I am so very grateful for the two glorious years I spent stitching away in there whilst the sun streamed through the double doors. (And the winters spent in a coat, hat and gloves bent shivering over my sewing machine, but, you know, that sounded less poetic!)
As first time home owners there are certainly many things you have to consider that I'd never even thought of before. Now don't get me wrong, I am really happy with the overall finish and we certainly have made a huge aesthetic transformation to what we started with, but there are some aspects of our renovation that I would do differently if I could.So, firstly, why the rush?!We were living in rented accommodation and managed to get a three week overlap where we could live in the comfort of one home, whilst drastically changing the next. Most of the work required was dusty and messy and in a small two-bed, we knew there would be no 'give' once we'd moved us, a baby, and all our stuff in, so we really needed it to be liveable and child-safe by the end of those three weeks.
People often ask us how on earth we do it all whilst looking after the children and to be honest with you, there is no magic answer. There is no wand that turns a dingy and dated hallway into a new fresh, practical and modern entrance unless you're willing to put in the hard work (or hard-earned cash). Whilst we don't have much of the latter, we have attempted (and completed) many DIY jobs around the house so here's a few tips that we've learnt along the way...
Two of the things that get the most comments over on my Instagram @theottohouse are our bathroom tiles and this exposed brick wall. It really was so very simple to do and at next-to-nothing cost, is a great way to add character to a room on a low budget, but despite that we still felt pretty intimidated by the job and almost didn't go for it. Do you have similar apprehensions? Read on to see how we did it and how we feel about living with exposed brick, one year on.
When we picked up the keys for our first home 'The Otto House', we had three weeks to get it ready for our little family. At the time Darcey had just turned one, and although a walk in shower with large white plastic handrails and a fold down seat may be welcoming for a weary mama after a long sleepness night, it certainly didn't please me aesthetically or suit our needs as a family bathroom. Thankfully a builder friend of ours was on hand to help us with the tiling and plumbing so we could crack on and get it finished in the couple of weeks before move in day.We started by ripping out the shower and the awful faux marble plastic surround that had been literally glued onto the tiles beneath it. Having spent ages trying to take the tiles off the wall around the fireplace downstairs, the thought of more tiles that needed removing (especially ones not factored into our tight time frame) was as unwelcome as a James Blunt song on the radio. I needn't have worried however as the tiles only required a few forceful taps, a bit of leverage with the chisel and they all fell down, bringing the wall with it!
Call me emotionally suppressed (I probably am!) but I really have an aversion to hearts on homeware pieces anywhere and can’t for the life of me stomach overly sentimental quotes. I’m also not even much of a fan of Valentine’s Day (grumpy, much?!) and am more than happy for the day to surpass me by.
However, what I do love, is the magical combo of red and pink together and the fact that Valentine’s Day bring’s these colours to the forefront is a huge positive for me.