room tour | the sitting room

I'm so excited to finally be showing you finished rooms, they've been such a long time coming! Everything's still in progress, but the bare bones of most - if not all - room are now there. It's all in the details from here on out, and based on my previous post where I talked about the inspiration behind my plans for this sitting room, you should be able to see where I'm going with this. But, I get ahead of myself! Let's start with the pre-decoration, no? And please excuse me, this post is a little picture heavy.

THE BEFORE

this weekend ...

... my friend, Fireman Ralph, made pesto with wild garlic, picked when driving over Caerphilly Mountain on Bank Holiday Monday. The drive back from Cardiff can take a number of routes, but the mountain road, past Castell Coch (the Red Castle) and through the forest, is stunning and definitely my favourite. Anna, Ralph and I spent the day puttering around, and pulled over at the top of the mountain to pick some wild garlic on our way home. Said to cover the mountain after the castle's kitchen garden ran wild when the original structure was abandoned and crumbled to ruins, the smell is so pungent you can literally smell the garlic from a mile away. It was an absolutely beautiful day, so no hardship to wander around in the woods.

ffefrynau friday | 10.05.13

1. antique sign diy 2. collarless babydoll dress 3. plywood flooring
4. yellow pleated skirt 5. how to print on fabric 6. embroidered top diy
7. pleated skirt 8. corn chowder 9. travelwee 

bed head

I've been meaning to do a post about my haircut for a while, more than just the gratuitous pic spam I put up immediately after the chop. It's been around 15 years since I last had really short hair and I was incredibly paranoid, shortly after seeing pictures, of looking like a boy. Whilst I loved how easy it was to simply roll out of bed, run my fingers through my hair, then go about my daily business without a further thought, the frequent trips to the hairdresser put paid to it rather quickly. As I've previously mentioned, if I don't write it down then I forget about it, and suddenly I had shoulder length hair again and figured it was easier to just keep growing it.

This time around, I'm prevaricating between keeping it short and letting it grow. The drastic change was prompted by laziness, pure and simple. And a little narcissism after I noticed that, roughly 15 years later than most people, I'd started to lose some of the puppy fat in my face that I'd been carrying since a teen. I suppose my body's finally realised it's about time to cut that baggage loose, having hit my late 30's and all. Geez. But the thought that I might now have visible cheekbones to help pull it off was a comfort. However, I cannot lie, the laziness was the real deciding factor; I find it really difficult to get out of bed, and the wolf has Kaiser to run around and play with in the mornings. Any changes to my morning schedule, such as getting up 15 minutes earlier, would ruin both those rather important daily happenings so I traded my hair for a lie in and a 30 minute play-date for the wolf. No, seriously, I totally did. 

It also helped that my hair had been feeling lank, that I needed some serious styling and (as it turned out) I was allergic to my shampoo (cross another one off the list!). And it's been delightful not having any hair to have to pin, primp, straighten, curl or otherwise muck about with pre-caffeine every morning. Although there has been one teeny tiny downside:

inspiration | the sitting room

With the house pretty much done (huzzah!), it's about time I turned my attention to the dressing of each room. Walls have been painted, doors hung and prettified, stuff unpacked and shoved back on to shelves. But this is the time I really enjoy; the minutiae, moving something from one place to another on a whim, seeing if I like it, moving it back and forwards, one room to another. Attempting to create the atmosphere I'm after, slowly and surely, piece by piece. Having mood boards (also known as Pinterest) help enormously, especially for someone like me who finds it very difficult to focus on just one aspect of their personality at once. So I thought I'd share some inspiration pictures, and the reasoning behind my plans, so that you can back me up when Mum starts telling me I have terrible taste again.

It became easier once I figured out how I wanted to use each room. My sitting room (as my mum likes to call it, lounge or living room trips off my tongue more easily than she wants to hear) is actually mostly a reading room. My television currently doesn't pick up television since Mum unwired the box during decoration and I'm too cheap to pay for an engineer to come out and make it work. Besides which, I rarely watch telly any more and if something is on the box it's more than likely to be a DVD. My sitting room can be an eclectic room, because I'm an eclectic person, and nothing sums that up better than having mis-matching chairs in my opinion. The ugly huge sofa is here to stay, but it needn't stay ugly and can be recovered in a deep solid green, put together with something like the below so there's a chair for every taste (and bum).