prints and prints

I still have a few blank walls left in my house that are just begging for some art love – mainly my two large walls in my living room. Right now they are both facing each other in equal blankness.

I think what has left these two walls blank for so long is their size – they are at least 4m wide and I just didn’t have anything to fill the space.

I have pondered it a while and I think I may have my solutions. On one of the walls I’d like to purchase two or three of Sharon Montrose’s animal prints – I am thinking this combination:

   

or this:

  

or:

  

The deciding is going to be tricky.

On the other – on which the couch backs onto – I am going to attempt to create a grouped wall of art. Now I say attempt – as I haven’t had much success in the past at grasping the eclectic look of things – but it seems a great, and inexpensive, way to showcase a lot of art, and it can grow and change with you. I am going to be using these as inspiration:

For what will be included in my print gathering – I am currently loving the below prints/artwork:

clockwise from top left; melbourne print by studiokmo, Jamais trop tard by evajuliet, Flaming Lips. Do You Realize. by 2142stuart, Watercolour Blobs by MadeByEmilyGreen, The Cool Tiger in Sunglasses by Lucius Art, Rabbit Watercolor PRINT by WaterInMyPaint, Cat Watercolor PRINT by WaterInMyPaint, Rain by Aneesh Vini, Wander Art Print by Wesley Bird, Ocean Blue by Leah Flores, Mac Cat by Florever, Deluge by Marc Allante.

So some thinking will have to be done – and some saving of money to afford these all.

Also – just apologies for the sporadic posting – I just started a new job and it has hindered my time to focus. Hopefully once I am in the swing it will get back more to normal.

a bit of a recap

So the past few days have been a bit hectic – so I decided to do a bit of a photo recap:

I discovered an awesome food truck when I headed to Preston Markets on Friday evening. Cornutopia is heading around for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and if you can I would hunt them down and order anything off their menu – it was absolutely delicious  and cheap! I scored an ‘el taco’ for $5.

My floors were finally finished! And I got to rearrange my furniture again (love to move things around). Now I am just living in constant fear of scratching my new floors – I think I need to invest in some rugs.

Bought some beautiful flowers at my local 24 hour flower shop (can’t believe there is a demand for 24 hour flowers – but I am not complaining). Cost me only $6 – love my neighbourhood!

Enjoyed Sunday morning cuddles.

How’d your weekend go? Hopefully none of you are affected by this crazy flooding and rain.

finally – new floors

So if you have been a follower for a while you would have been aware of my floor dramas. If not, I will do a quick recap for you.

I bought my house in June of 2009 and moved in in the September. When I moved in the downstairs floorboards were perfectly fine – although they had a few dents, and I wasn’t a fan of the shiny gloss on the boards. A few months in I noticed my laundry doors were becoming harder and harder to open – they were scraping against the floor. I soon figured out that my floorboards were becoming warped, and were raised from the ground. We tracked it back to a fault in the plumbing which was causing the slow leaking of water into the under floor.

Now fast forward almost two years later, to mid last year, and I finally had managed to get the insurance  claim approved and I had the water damaged laundry repaired, and tiled (to prevent any further water causing such damage). You can see that work here.

It then took a further few months to get the insurance claim through for the actual floorboards next to the laundry. As my whole downstairs is open plan, and they couldn’t source wood that was the same to my existing wood, they had to re-lay the entire downstairs floors.  Work started last week and if all goes to plan I should be coming home to completed floors this afternoon. Hopefully I will have an after photo for this before:

Stay tuned!

diy prints

Although my house is getting closer to completion, I still have a few bare walls which need some colour, namely the walls in my living room. These happen to be some largest wall spaces I have in one area, and thus have been quite tricky to decide on a plan to fill them.

After buying some beautiful lillies the other day an idea struck me on how to fill one of those walls – and on a budget to! It took a few weeks to execute, but I think I now have the makings of some great diy art.  Now you will have to imagine these prints individually framed and evenly spaced on a large wall:

Now I can’t decide between using the above versions, which have been ‘boosted’ colour wise, or the below versions which are more true to life:

I still have some fine-tuning to do to the pictures, to make them more uniform but I like where they are heading. In order to photography the lillies I kept them in the same space and tried to take the photo at the same time of day each day. If I can’t get the consistency I am looking for with these shots (in terms of having them the same size, similar shadows etc) I may try the experiment again – but this time set up my camera on a tripod and don’t move it for the entirety of the flowers life. The problem with this however is I won’t be able to use my camera for anything else.

Either way hopefully soon I will have at least one problem wall filled some with art – and as you will see in a just under a month – it will be one of my 25 before 25 items to fill all my walls in my home with art I love.  Stay tuned for the final product – hopefully it won’t be far off.

 

my house tour

So I finally got around to taking photos of my house (well my house was finally tidy enough to take photos!) so I have updated the house page on my blog. Feel free to check it out if you want to see my decorating attempts thus far.

Just one of the pictures featured – my dining room table with my new chairs I bought on ebay:

 

dining room chairs, finally!

So I have finally found (and bought) dining room chairs. After over two years of the Ikea plastic folding chairs I will finally have proper dining room chairs.

I have eyed off these Freedom dining room chairs for quite some time now, but at $99 each, I would be spending at least $400 for a set of 4, and I just couldn’t part with that much at once.

After months of intermittent searching on ebay I finally came across (and won) a listing for five of these babies! I will probably end up buying an extra chair to make it a round six, but for $150 for the five all up I am more than happy to spend that extra $99 for just one more chair.  Hopefully they will suit my dining room table (another ebay find!)

the weekend

And the weekend is nearly over…sigh. Sunday evenings are always filled with a slight melancholy of knowing it is back to work tomorrow, but at least, looking back, it has been a good weekend.

A snapshot of what I got up to:

Just before hometime on Friday I got my delivery from the Book Depository – I had purchased a week earlier Thai Food by David Thompson, which is supposed to be the quintessential Thai cookbook, and after a quick look through this weekend it is definitely thorough. The book goes through a lot of the history of Thailand, as well as the workings of Thai kitchens before it even gets to the recipes. I like having this background, especially since I am headed to Thailand early next year. I am going to have to try to pick one recipe to try (due the quantity in the book it will be a challenge).

After an intensely stressful work week, I decided to end it by popping into the new Ikea in Springvale (just around the corner from my work). The place is massive, apparently it is the size of two MCGs – just insane. I didn’t end up buying much, but I did grab a few cheap vases for around the house.

      

I can cross #20 off my 24 before 24 – I finally got around to folding the cranes to fill my vase. I also stopped off at a florist today and brought some colour inside with these beautiful flowers.

   

Tonight I made another meal from Jamie Oliver’s 30 minute meals - Piri Piri chicken, rocket salad and dressed potatoes. I just finished eating it 30 minutes ago and it was delish! The combination of the three components worked really well, even the rocket salad, which I was sceptical about as it was literally just rocket, lemon juice, olive oil and salt – not what I would traditionally call a salad but a great accompaniment none the less. The hero of this meal was definitely the potatoes, the flavours of the feta, chilli and coriander were a refreshing change to usual mashed potatoes.

The rest of the weekend was filled with cleaning (mum coming to stay next week), braving the cold for a night out dancing and also some subsequent recovery napping…

Hope you all had a great weekend – much happening for the week ahead?

new ikea catalogue – who else is excited?

If I could live in one catalogue it would definitely be the Ikea catalogue – every year I have awaited its release (even before I had the money to even afford their meatballs) and drooled over its pages. Now that I have an actual home to fill with furniture its release is even more anticipated – I even envisage that once I have the funds to move past the Ikea stage of my life I will still quietly get excited when I see its new release.

Now unfortunately, where I live, I don’t see to get the mail drop of catalogues that has begun – and you can’t order a catalogue until after this is complete – so for now I have had to be content with flicking the online pages on the Ikea website (available here if you’re wondering).

On my first few looks (oh yes there will be a few readings) here are the pieces/looks that have stood out for me:

Have you received your catalogue? Any stand outs?

Bemz swatches

I just received my Bemz swatches in the post – they are for my Lillberg chairs as discussed here. Completely forgot they were coming.

I think the chenille Graphite Grey is my favourite so far (the very back swatch) – it is really soft to touch and the dark grey would hide little marks well. You can order five swatches for free from their website – so if you are looking to recover anything Ikea I would highly recommend them – the postage took a while, but it is coming all the way from Sweden!

an idea is forming

my ikea rast bedside tables, a chevron stencil and purple paint…