The Interior DIYer
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Getting nesty

It took me quite unexpectedly, but in the beginning stages of my pregnancy my design taste took a u-turn. It changed completely and I was very close to tearing everything out of our apartment, buying really colourful accessories and painting all the walls blue. I’m glad for my crippling morning sickness though as it stopped me from doing anything and luckily as the weeks passed I grew out of my temporary fad and started to love our apartment again [no offence to anyone who has a colourful home – I love colourful homes and applaud people who embrace colour! I just know after years of trying, I can’t live with much colour].

One thing that did stick as my nesting fever continued was an overwhelming need to add greenery to our home. Kind of like literally nesting; in the true sense of the word.

I’ve added little touches of leafy greens here and there through accessories so I don’t scare myself off it too quickly. I ordered this Leaves + dots pillow from K is for Black by Anna Dorfman the other week and I love the pattern on it so much. It’s perfect and has spent time in almost every room since it arrived.

That rosemary plant has since died. On the other hand our fiddle leaf fig [which are known for being picky plants] has grown by 8 leaves since I brought it home in January. It’s gotten so big that I’ll be moving it into the spare bedroom / nursery soon enough! It seems the more difficult the plant, the easier is it for me to keep alive. I’ve given up trying to figure out that anomaly. 

The nursery is DEFINITELY having green happen to it. At the moment I want to paint the whole thing a really dark forest green, but I don’t think I’m brave enough to do it. I’m still getting my head around a design so the spare bedroom hasn’t been touched yet. I’ll be starting work on it in the next couple of weeks now that work it quieting down so I’ll have some energy to tackle it. 
As of tomorrow, bebe will be here in t-minus 14 weeks [I’M IN MY THIRD TRIMESTER WTF!] so I’m hoping to decide on a design within the next week and start soon after. I would have considered myself a fairly nesty person before I got pregnant, but my urge to clean and reorganise every aspect of everything ever is becoming almost uncontrollable. I’m also kind of not complaining. 

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Nursery plans – part 1

Before I share the exciting side of my design ideas for the nursery, I first have to tackle the far less exciting side that is the spare bedroom as it is now and getting it from this point to an empty room. Sounds easy? It’s not as straight forward as I’d like it to be thanks to us being renters living with our landlords furniture and not having as much freedom as a homeowner would have. But I’ve successfully managed to come up with a solution to almost every problem.

Feel free to allow your eyes to glaze over while you scroll as chances are you won’t find the below particularly interesting. It’s a solution I’ve come up with as a renter so I figured maybe one other person out there might find it interesting, so here it is … 

1. DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING – and everything else on the walls. I’ve found so many cute things to hang up and have some fun ideas, but that can’t start until I repaint.
2. REPAINT – this is an obvious step but it’s something that needs to be done before I start working on the nursery. I just need to decide on a colour.
3. UNDER THE BED – four years’ worth of college work and the dismantled shelves from our living room [as in the ‘before’ photo here] have been expertly rammed stored under our spare bed. Out of sight, out of mind! That is, until we get to number 5 below … 
4. DECLUTTER – I’ll be doing another sweep of what we have at the moment and either selling or donating as much as I can. I’ve gotten rid of a lot over the past two years but thanks to nesting hormones, I want to get rid of everything unnecessary. 
5. DISASSEMBLE THE SPARE BED – since we’re renters and the bed in the spare bedroom is our landlord’s, we can’t get rid of it. My plan is to stack the spare mattress on top of the mattress in our bedroom, disassemble the spare bed and store it under our bed. I also have to relocate the college work and shelves that are currently under the spare bed to under our bed and hope it all fits.

6. CHAOTIC CUPBOARDS – possibly scarier than under the bed; the cupboards in our spare bedroom. They hold about half of everything we own. Our Christmas decorations, more college work, my wedding dress, a printer, our landlords artwork, old Playstations, summer / winter clothes, one hundred years of wrapping paper that’s too pretty to use and mementos to name a few. All have to be ruthlessly culled. 
7. MOAR SHELVES – this random set of shelves belongs to our landlord and sit awkwardly at the entrance to our spare bedroom creating a bottle-neck to the room [which will be v. awkward when bebe comes]. We keep our DVD collection on them at the moment, but I’m hoping to move the DVDs elsewhere and put these shelves within the cupboard [no. 6 above] so the shelves can house overflow bebe stuff that we won’t have room for in the room itself.

If you’ve read this far, I commend you! If you haven’t, I don’t blame you. That’s the plan I have so far to get the spare bedroom ready for its new design and subsequently, new occupant. I cannot wait to share the plans I have for the nursery! Not to mention get started on decluttering and organising and assembling tiny bebe things. 
And for good measure, I’ll end on an awkward selfie … 
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Lately + a bit of a rant

It’s been so long [for me] since I last blogged. It’s been 6 weeks since I last published something here and considering I’ve been blogging at least twice a week for the past 5 years, going 6 weeks without doing anything has been weird and a little scary. Work has been really busy as well as most of our spare time in general these days, so by the time I get home I usually have zero cares left to work on anything. 

Actually, truth be told, the reason I haven’t done much blogging is because anything I want to do around our apartment I can no longer do by myself. Which is a world of frustrating levels of bullshit. Yes, I realise I’m pregnant and I have to be careful, but I’m not someone who has ever had to wait for someone else to help me before jumping into a project [bar electrical stuff]. I’m not dainty and I don’t value my looks very much so in the past if something needed to be done, I’d get stuck in regardless of the physical harm that may come my way. I mean, when I swapped the two beds in our apartment, one of the beds [now in our bedroom] weighed, I shit you not, about 300lbs. Maybe even 400lbs. It’s solid wood and it needed to be turned on its side to be able to move it down the hallway. I did all of that solo. But now. Now that I’m with child. Oh sweet baby deity … Never have I been treated so much like a tiny injured bird and it makes me feel a spectrum of useless. I do realise I have to take it easy for the next few months, and I’m trying, but I really cannot wait until I am allowed to move something really heavy or do something by myself. It’s tough as when I get an idea I have to stop myself and say, “No, hold on. I have to wait for Robert to come home to move that for me.” So that’s partly why I haven’t been able to do much around our apartment, and subsequently, not been able to blog much. 
It’s a big learning curve for me so I’m trying to get used to asking for help. As of this week I’ve had a burst of wanting to get things done so the mahogany mirror that’s been sitting in the corner of our bedroom for more than a year [as seen here] is finally up and hanging in our hallway! Special thanks to Dad DIYer and Robert who hung it up earlier this week [I wasn’t allowed to help as it’s very heavy]. I’ve also been taking some pictures for a very exciting feature coming up so I’ve bought a few new things I’ve been eyeing for a while. One of them being this brass candle holder from Article, a few peonies from Appassionata and some new bedding … 

ME –          “I want to look at new sheets for our room today.”
ROBERT –  “We need new sheets? But we already have sheets and a duvet on the bed.“
ME –          “We need new sheets. Sheet-sheets.”
ROBERT –  *Total confusion*

We got new sheets in the end.