The Interior DIYer
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Sneak peek – living room makeover

At long last, I’ve begun my living room makeover I planned way back in May. Monday was a glorious Bank Holiday for us here in Ireland, so I spent my day cleaning my apartment, painting, and cleaning up after painting. And I enjoyed it. 

This is what I fancied up a couple months ago for what I wanted our main feature wall to look like {you can check out my original makeover post here}. This entire wall was originally all chalkboard painted, but since our apartment is dark, all that black wasn’t exactly cheer inducing. 
I’m not one to set goals and then let them get dusty, and after 3 months it was getting dusty enough for me.

So above is a snippet of what’s left of our blackboard wall. Much more sophisticated. And a lot brighter. I painted the surrounding wall with Crown Paint‘s ‘Swans a Swimming’, as chosen last October for the rest of our living room. I blogged that too. You can check out here.

For what has happened over the past couple of weeks {lots of unnecessary stress, and none of it wedding related}, I thought the text on the below E Card was quite suiting, so I scrawled it in my fanciest penmanship on the remaining blackboard left above our shelf. I’m going to go on a limb here and assume I’m not the only one feeling like this … 

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Pillow talk

I recently had a horrific experience shopping for a dress for my cousins wedding. Long story short, it took about 4 hours, but we found an awesome dress right as I was loosing my sanity. I rewarded my relentlessness determination* after said purchase by heading to the closest home department to touch stuff and calm down a bit. And TK Maxx was my special place of choice.

I was blissfully browsing hat boxes I’ll never need, when just like that, our eyes met and I knew these were mine. This pair of monochromatic velvet geometric puppies were one of those moments where you are 400% in love with something and have 0% doubt in your mind this would make your life better. I know. They’re just pillows.

I have affectionately called these our ‘Magneto’ pillows {we may or may not have watched the trilogy that weekend}. But seriously, how awesome are these? They are incredibly comfortable and are an incredible quality considering they were only  €16.99 each. Hell to the yes.

Let’s also talk about the pillow chop. This is important. This is an art. This is also something I cunningly explained to fiance was “fun and you’d like it because you get to karate chop a pillow to make it look all good”. My subtle manipulation worked, as I have crept fiance prepping and chopping said pillows. Yes, yes.

* This is a complete lie. I was a nightmare. My poor mother dragged me from shop to shop where I relentlessly complained about my lack of developing an eating disorder in order to wear normal women’s sizes. I’m sure they’ll write a Berenstain Bears book about my episode.  

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Thinking outside the box

Since me and leopard print tissue box have spent so much time together over the past week, I realized I had a blog post staring me straight in the face. First, I must credit this trick to my mom.

This is a simple trick that can be applied to many things around your home. It’ll save you money, while giving the illusion you can fritter your money away on fancy things; reusing a fancy tissue box by refilling it with a cheaper brand of tissue. Because you’re fabulously frugal.

What you’ll need:
– fancy tissue box
– cheap tissues for when  fancy tissues run out
– 2 paperclips

Step 1: go through fancy tissues as you normally would. Step 2: when fancy tissue box is empty, don’t throw it out! Heavens, no. Carefully open the side of your tissue box {or bottom, depending on the box}. Step 3: fill with cheaper and otherwise blasé brand of tissues, then close your tissue box with the help of two cleverly disguised paper clips. I use paperclips in stead of tape, since tape may peel the fancy pattern off your tissue box.

It doesn’t sound like much, but this reduce, reuse, recycle trick can be used with loads of stuff around your house on many levels. You just gotta think outside the box.

Do any of you have your own sneaky and deceptive tricks that you use around your home? I bet you do.