Odds and Sods

Just a few touch-ups from different places around the house:

Naked light bulbs - like naked mole rats - are gross. Just to prove the point, here’s the mole rat:

See what I mean? How much better does that make my £20 capiz shell pendant light shade from Sainsbury’s look? Correct answer: much better. Since I couldn’t get the light cover off in the bedroom (where I wanted it to go), I decided the living room’s ceiling light was much more vulnerable to my decorating attack.

Adding a mirror to our bedroom’s otherwise bare walls was a very worthwhile project. Not only did we find something to match the black-brown of the rest of our furniture, but the mirror is a good size and makes the room feel a tiny bit bigger.

The next idea for the bedroom is to find a better place than the wardrobe door to hang my necklaces and big floppy straw hat. I'm thinking of making a fun hanger to mount on the wall. Something functional and cute. There are a few ideas I've been toying with on Pinterest:

I love hanging pictures. And by that, I mean, standing back while your husband does all the hammering and heavy lifting of pictures and mirrors and saying,"Umm, a little higher...just to the right...yeah! I think that's good. Wait, let me look at it from the other side..." Nothing seems to make a place feel more like it’s yours than hanging up your own artwork:

That's the Husband and some of his friends. He made that himself!

This felt like the perfect spot for my tiny pictures of Scotland.

Artwork from one of Angus' classmates at their final exhibition in Shoreditch.

See? Some of these pictures I've been waiting to get framed and properly hung up for...oh, four years! Better late than never, right? My two Van Gogh prints and the da Vinci came from the National Gallery of Art in DC my sophomore year of college and it took me until our big Ikea trip to get frames for them. Lame, I know. At least now they look pretty spiffy over our dining table. (The table is not in this picture because it's still holding junk from when I cleared the nursery to paint the other day...I should tidy that...)

The sofa bed is now assembled and waiting eagerly for someone to come and sleep on it (ahem…Mom). Slowly but surely, this apartment gets more inviting. Just imagine what I’ll do when I have a whole house that we’ve bought. If this is what nesting does to me, I should tackle all my DIY projects when I’m pregnant!

Last but not least, a few fun finds from a window shopping excursion to T.K. Maxx yesterday. That's right, T.K. Maxx....I didn't make a typo there, the store actually has a different middle initial in the UK. What purpose this serves, I have no idea. But they still have cute stuff for cheap!

Cute woven baskets make much nicer-looking storage than ratty old cardboard boxes (something we have a lot of). And they're nicely lined with some suede-effect stuff inside to protect all the miscellaneous junk we still apparently need to keep.

New nursery lamp shade? I'm seriously considering it.

I covet this just a little bit. Actually, I took this picture because I recognise the fabric. It's called Full Stop and it's from a company called Prestigious Textiles. Why do I know this? Because I bought some for another project I'm waiting to start... (milking a mild moment of suspense for all it's worth, here!)

Hooray for stackable tables. The simple lines are nice, and if I had anywhere to make them useful, I might have walked out of the store with them. Though really, the last thing I need is another place to dump piles of clutter. I may have become a much neater person when I went away to college, but that's purely by comparison to the child who piled clothes on a purple inflatable chair (yeah, I just admitted that I bought myself purple blow-up furniture) and repeatedly accumulated a collection of cups and saucers on the desk and dresser.

So those are some of the improvements I've been making around the house. With only four months now to go until I have an outside baby (eek!), I think I'll be able to keep myself occupied with cleaning and decorating until it's time to deflate the beach ball growing on my tummy and see the tiny human who's been using my insides for kickboxing practise.