The Interior DIYer
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Coffee station update – mini faux marble plinth

Last weekend I made a very simple change to our kitchen. This time last year I updated our kitchen and created a mini coffee station in the far corner. Said coffee station looked a bit lonely. Like it was being punished and put in the naughty corner. Making hot drinks is a social thing so I first brought it all forward to the middle of the kitchen. 

For a while now I’ve wanted to get rid of the black tray we were using previously and get [or make] something a bit more fresh all up in there. I had a large chunk of timber in our storage cupboard for a couple of years now, so I cut it to a more manageable size and luckily had the perfect amount of leftover marble contact paper to cover the piece. I quickly covered it and used it to prop up all our coffee and tea accessories. It’s the perfect size for our kitchen, helps define our little station without taking up too much space or height and is in a perfect wipe-able finish. 
I really do love when you make a small change to your home and it makes all the difference. Robert [who is the sole user of both coffee and tea in our household] was really happy with how it turned out and how fancy it looks. These kind of projects are my favourite. Especially when they cost next-to-nothing or even better – completely free. 

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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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Mahogany mirror hallway update

About a year and a half ago my parents gave us their mahogany mirror for safe keeping. Unfortunately, it went to waste for a long time and sat wrapped in the corner of our bedroom [as seen in this blog post] that is, until last week!

I had every intention to hang up said beautiful mirror, but I wasn’t sure exactly where to hang it. For a long time I thought about hanging it in our room, but I wasn’t 100% certain so it continued to sit. It finally dawned on me to hang it at the end of our hallway behind the front door. It was the perfect space for it! Long before we moved in our landlord stuck a cluster of IKEA mirrors to the wall behind the front door. They definitely were a functional addition to the hallway, but their charm had well and truly warn off in recent years. At the very least, they were impossible to keep clean.

It’s not too noticeable from this photo, but not all the mirrors were flush [to be honest, as we found out when hanging the mahogany mirror, the wall itself is not flat]. If you were standing in the hallway trying to use the collective cluster of mirrors to inspect your outfit, your knees may be left entirely out of the equation thanks to the different angles of the mirrors. There were many blind spots and some of the mirrors tilted outwards vertically leading you to believe you were wider than you actually were. Not something anyone, let along a pregnant woman, wants to see. You can kind of see this effect on the mirror Juniper appears on. 

Using a metal ruler, I carefully removed the mirrors by filleting the ruler behind each mirror and scraped the sticky pads off of the back of each mirror, one at a time. I sanded the leftover sticky marks and applied about 4 – 5 even coats of paint to the entire wall [those yellow marks proved tricky to hide]. I carefully stored each mirror on top of the wardrobe in the spare bedroom and will put them back in place when we eventually move out. 

Dad DIYer, along with help from Robert, hung the mirror last week and it has made such a HUGE change to our hallway. We’re no longer warped-looking when checking out our outfits and it’s such a welcome and more put-together addition to our hallway. Also, mahogany. When we grow up and have a real house ALL OF THE THINGS will be mahogany.