The Interior DIYer

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Lovely feature – From China Village

This morning I am tore up from the floor up to share with you an exciting feature featuring yours truly over on Emily Westbrooks’s website, From China Village! Emily got in contact with me about a new feature she was rolling out on her website – meeting up with bloggers in their favourite blogging environments. Emily asked if I’d like to show her around the charity shop / thrifting scene and of course, I was well up for it. 
Look how co-ordinated we are with our stripes and North American accents. Well played. Click on over to Emily’s feature – Let’s Meet Bloggers Face to Face // Alex of Hydrangea Girl – to read all about our day at Merchants Market, and you can see me doing what I do best; digging through stuff, finding weird, unusual and cat-related items, and making faces.

For those of you curious to know if I took home the crazy-cat-lady-teapot I found, um, hell yes I did … 

… Look at her – helping herself to a plate full of sausages, a slight crazed look in her eye and a if I’m not mistaken, blood dripping from the corners of her mouth. Or possibly sloppy artistry. Who wouldn’t bring her home? But in all seriousness, I’m on the lookout for some ceramic paint or pens so I can give her a bit of a makeover. Friendlier eyes, a less gross ensemble, and maybe a pretty flowery plate. I think I’ll keep the bloody grin though. Accidental or not. 

ADDED BONUS – I fancied up a map of one of my favourite Dublin charity shop routes for Emily in conjunction with my thrifty feature – Alex’s Dublin Charity Shop Tour. It’s one of my favourite charity shop routes in the heart of the Dublin city centre, and is perfect if you’re stuck for time as you can easily hit all 6 shops in 20 minutes if you’re in a hurry. 

Thank you so much Emily for being such great company, both online and in person {oh god – mustn’t forget Julie the uber cool photographer too!}, for being such great sources of inspiration, for the pep talks and for letting me get carried away. xx A

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Instagram roundup – September

Since I signed up to the Instagram machine at the beginning of this month, I thought it would be fun to do a little monthly round up of my favourite Instapics. And when I say fun, in reality it’s fun for me and probably incredibly boring for you guys … I selected my favourite 15 photos and added them in Instagram order; starting at the bottom right to the most recent on the top left. 
I was a bit surprised though when I looked through this months photos; very few of them were design related. Which is mostly down to me being a bit MIA for the past two weeks. My usual routine was affected, I had no access to a computer and kissed my spare time goodbye. At first I panicked. Oh god, I have to race home and create, photograph and write up 3 blog posts, schedule them, also co-ordinate and schedule social media notifications. Fuuuuuu! I fought it for a couple of days. But then I kind of welcomed it. I took advantage of the opportunity to step back, gather my thoughts, and scribble lots of ideas on some well placed post-its. 
Sometimes we need a little break from our usual schedule and daily routine, but now I’m back with a notebook full of ideas and some exciting dates coming up. And more importantly, my favourite season has started to kick in – scarves, hot drinks, mittens and crunchy leaves. Oh autumn, I love you so!
Of course, if you’d like to follow along, you can find me on Instagram here! See you back here on Wednesday 🙂 xx A
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DIY Friday – dapper dresser

I’m not sure if you could call this week’s DIY Friday technically a DIY, but it’s a revamp no less to a piece of furniture I bought 4 years ago. Our apartment didn’t come with storage for one’s small items in our bedroom, so I went online and bought this old wooden dresser. It was cheap as chips and did the trick. It held my garments, husbands manly stuff, and a drawer dedicated to pyjamas. Perfect. 
In the early years of my apartment designing, I painted the top of the dresser with leftover paint; it was a weird greeny-grey paint, and I don’t know what the hell I was thinking to be honest. I quickly gave up on doing anything with our dresser and then 4 years happened. Yeah. For 4 years it sat like this in our room … 

I think the word you’re looking for is ‘fugly’. I hated it and it was such an eyesore in our bedroom. Last month I finally had enough, so I got on my bicyclette, cycled to Rua on Capel Street and picked up a tin of Annie Sloan Chalk Paint.

Back in the day I had a major crush on the EDLAND line of furniture from IKEA. I daydreamed of having a house and filling it to the rafters with beautiful EDLAND armoires and dressers. Sadly, that line became extinct, but I was lucky enough to swipe a little EDLAND bedside table in their final sale {sadly, it was the only piece we had room for}. To date, it’s still one of my favourite IKEA pieces. I adore the dark grey, and it inspired me to pick Annie Sloan’s moody warm ‘Graphite’ grey.

Enough of that. Onto the makeover! I cleaned the dresser of any dust and whatnot, took out all the drawers and flipped it over to start. He was in bad need of a pedicure, so I sorted that out while I was down there. Yes, I’m claiming this dresser to be man as no woman would let her feet look like that.
After two coats of paint on the feet I turned it right-side-up and gave the body two coats. Pretty straight forward.

While I was at it, I updated the drawer pulls as well. I’m afraid I picked these up years ago in IKEA – they’re from the GLIRA range which is also now extinct. You can actually see one of these drawer pulls in the ‘before’ photo that I replaced years ago in premature revamp excitement. Our dresser kind of looked like it was winking for a very long time …

I took the old rusty drawer pulls off, filled the holes with decorators calk, let it dry, painted the drawers with two coats of paint and finally added my ‘new’ GLIRA pulls. And ta dah! It was much easier project then I thought it would be.

I’m so happy with the result and I really don’t know why I didn’t tackle this project sooner. I guess it was just one of those things you keep reminding yourself to do, and after years of mental torment, you break down and do it eventually. Please tell me I’m not the only one with ‘guilt projects’ that eat your brain like a zombie?
Anyways homies, it’s Friday and I cannot wait for the weekend to hurry up and get here. Happy Friday! xx A