Verruca’s Red And Aqua Kitchen

I want a house. Possibly the only thing I want more than a house right now is a baby.

They are both quite a way off.

But that doesn’t stop me from dreaming.

I still wander around the shops and pick out clothes I would buy my newborn, sweet purple tops with owls, deep blue babygrows with pirates on them.

I read (and steal) my mother in law’s decorating magazines, read design blogs and bookmark things that I would put in my house. I dream about the day when we no longer have to live in a rented magnolia box and I can have the freedom to make a house my own, to paint the boys’ rooms, and not have to deal with rent inspections.

1. Sweet-Pills, 2. Kitchenology by Jenny & Aaron ~everyday is a holiday~, 3. bobb and cherries, 4. Kitchen, 5. heart apron, 6. Tea Towel Swap, 7. ::vintage kitchen swap::, 8. Fruity Photography, 9. Handmade Brooch Bambi fawn deer red white flower blue

Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to have a roof over my head, but sometimes that little brat inside me rears her ugly head and has a tantrum about not being able to paint the walls lime green.

I’ll call her Verruca.

This is Verruca’s dream kitchen:

The walls are bright aqua, the cupboards are clean and white, it’s perfectly accessorised with red canisters and teacups, there are plenty of polka dots everywhere. The dining table is large and surrounded by mismatched chairs, all painted bright cherry red. It has original art prints that she’s picked up from the local artists markets and a tin Coca-cola sign that she nabbed for $4 from an opshop. There’s never any flour splatters on her Kitchenaid, and the oven is big enough to cook for an army. It’s retro, but not overwhelmingly so.

Oh. And everything is self cleaning.

Verruca makes an awesome lasagna, she also lives in a world where she doesn’t have a stack of opened mail sitting on her worktop, just next to the pile of dirty dishes, she has angelic kids that don’t pull all the plastic plates out of the draw when she’s not looking and, most importantly, Verruca has a husband that doesn’t roll his eyes and say that red and aqua combined is the gaudiest thing ever, and no way in hell would he ever have a kitchen like that… oh, and by the way, mood boards are  “full of shit”.

Word of advice: Whenever you hook up with someone you may one day end up living with for the remainder of your life, make sure your design tastes don’t completely and utterly clash.

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ETA: Verruca’s husband also doesn’t threaten to delete her blog when she writes bitchy things about him, he’s nice like that, he also has a six pack.

Welcoming The Early Stages Of Insanity

Yesterday I sat down and sorted a pack of sprinkles into colours. It didn’t occur to me until Dan asked what the hell I was doing that this might be a little strange, I just didn’t want the decorations on my cupcakes to clash.

The day that I’d planned to make Declan’s cupcakes for his preschool birthday celebration was the same day my waters broke and I went into hospital, and then when I had Robyn on his actual birthday it obviously put something of a spanner in the works. As such Declan’s third birthday has managed to be dragged out over a month with the various celebrations and trips out.

Fortunately this is the last one, his birthday tea at preschool. Ten minutes where he is the focus of everyone in the room followed by the consumption of cupcakes, the only way it could get any better would be a personal appearance from Spiderman – we’re saving that one for his fourth birthday though.

A Hot Sweaty Version Of Scrooge

…and I don’t mean hot and sweaty in a naughty way, I mean hot and sweaty in that it’s hot enough to cook steak on the pavement and I’m knocked up and dripping bucket after bucket of sweat from every available pore.

I am still adjusting to the Australian Christmas. Christmas in the UK is just such a different experience. I can’t help but feel like it’s just some big elaborate make believe that the entire country puts on just to wind up tourists. I love Australia, I am very happy to call it my home, but December always brings with it a strong longing for the motherland. Homesickness, combined with being 7 months pregnant and the ridiculous heat ends up with me becoming Scrooge.

Last year the Christmas tree went up when Declan went to bed on Christmas Eve and came down 24 hours later the following day, and even in that short space of time Declan still managed to pull the entire thing down about five times. This year we have double the trouble with a now mobile Connor to add to the mix, and there was no way I was putting that much work into a tree just for a day of the pretty. So instead the scrooge in me splashed out fifteen bucks on ebay and replaced our tree with stickers.

Best. Idea. Eva.

It took me five minutes to put up. It looks festive without being too in your face OMG CHRISTMAS!! Declan’s delighted with counting the balls and telling me what the pictures are. And best of all, come January the 6th it will take me five minutes to pull down, and there’s not even a hint of having to battle with fairy lights or vacuum up glitter until June.

Christmas decorating win!

It Aint Easy Being Green

You’d be stretching to call me houseproud. I do the absolute bare minimum to make my home livable, I don’t ever see myself being featured in an issue of Better Homes.

But I have a want.

More accurately, a need.

I need a lime green sofa. I can’t look at my lounge room without mentally ridding myself of the grey ’80s sofa that is currently sitting in the corner and replacing it with a bright acid green sofa. Not mint, not a hint of green, something that makes any visitor ponder whether I’ve skinned Kermit The Frog to make a comfortable seating area for my home.

Our current sofa was the one Dan had when I moved in with him five years ago. It has a grey fan pattern with pink highlights, it’s modular and every time you sit on it each section shifts, meaning that you need to move it back into place multiple times each day, it has a lingering smell that I can only describe as two year old fishfingers. I hate this sofa so much that I actually avoid photographing the kids on that side of the room because I don’t want to look at the pictures in the future and see it.

But that isn’t the worse of it…

Last week my Mother In Law moved into a new house, of course this brought out all the old photo albums as the boxes were being unpacked. I was looking at pictures of my Sister In Law at her Debutante Ball, at sixteen years old, and there, in the background, was they grey five seater monstrosity that currently lives in our lounge.

I don’t have a problem with using my mother in law’s old sofa. What does bother me is that my SIL is now 33, making the sofa roughly a million years old. It isn’t retro and funky, it’s the furniture equivalent of hammer pants, it wasn’t great then and it’s so much worse now, it’s slap bracelets and gigantic perms, it doesn’t belong in this time and it doesn’t belong in my damn lounge room.

I’m not insane, I have no desire to go out and spend thousands of dollars on a sofa when we have t0ddlers and babies in the house. My grand plan is to pick up a cheapy sofa from Fantastic Furniture, in lime green, abuse the hell out of it for a few years and then replace it when my life is ruled slightly less by sticky hands and stray crayons. By the time we need a new sofa I’ll be over the green and far more open to the idea of a far more sensible and neutral colour.

But my husband is a cruel man, who apparently will not “give into fads“. According to him the grey hulk sofa is wonderful, the seats perfectly mold to his body and it’s long enough that his 6ft4 frame can sleep on it, but none of that is his main reasoning for keeping it for the last 25 years. The number one reason that I, according to Dan, need to show respect to the 20 year old sofa that has seen more arses than George Michael, is because “at least when the kids vomit on it the pattern covers it up!”.

I’m not kidding, that is his number one selling point.

O_o

I just don’t know where to start on that one.