Howard in the hallway

Well, it's so long since I last wrote (five whole weeks!) that my hair has grown and lost its sharpness so I guess I'll have to get it cut and restored to its pixie glory soon (I fear there are...

Short hair, don’t care

My hair has always been a bit tricky to manage but having children has pretty much finished it off.  It's very fine and set atop a rather high forehead; then the rather dull natural brown shade has been highlighted blonde...

The colours keep on coming

In my slightly deluded head, my house leans towards minimalist and neutral decor.  There were actually promising signs of this when the basement was renovated as we started with white painted wood and limestone floors, bleached out reclaimed and driftwood...

A space for sewing stuff

Over the last year or so, I seem to have accumulated rather a lot of fabric from a variety of sources: Ebay, car boot sales, charity shops and the occasional splurge of nice new fabric from shops on the web. ...

Great Expectations 6 – the magical kingdom under the stairs

Cupboards are really useful, especially when they're nice and wide with lots of shelving like the under stairs one in our basement.  The only problem is though, when I bought the house just over a decade ago, into the cupboard...

Great Expectations 5 – living and playing

One of the biggest challenges facing us in our basement is the way we live versus the actual space available: it's essentially two bog standard adjoining rooms, perfect for a kitchen and dining room.  However, we like to cook, dine,...

Great expectations 4 – seeing the light

The dining area was the last part of the kitchen renovation to be completed.  It's an awkward space as the only real place we could squeeze it in was in the widened area between the kitchen and lounge.  In most...

Great Expectations 3 – from cupboard of horrors to dream pantry

In my last blog post here, I told the story of how the crumbling, damp basement kitchen was replaced.  One of the problems we had with the old kitchen was that the Ikea pull-out larder cupboard no longer worked for...

Great Expectations 2 – the main kitchen

In my last blog post, I talked about the preparation for our epic basement kitchen overhaul and here's the next chapter: Work started on demolition of the existing kitchen in the second week of March 2016: it was a bit...