The Interior DIYer
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Living room lighting plans

I feel that lonely light fixture’s life story should be narrated by ze frank.
The more improvements and updates I make to our rental, the more ideas I get to make slightly more daring changes. Slightly. We don’t own our apartment, but we’ve been living here for 7 years now so I’m getting a bit cheekier about making changes. Changes I will say, that can be undone with a bit of filler and paint. Like hanging our mahogany mirror, painting our bedroom and the spare bedroom [both white], re-caulk the bathroom and do something about the lighting in the living room are a few things on my list. 

Here’s what I’ve had in mind to add to our living room ceiling to make things a bit fancier, while sticking as much as I can to some of my environmental resolutions …

1. I’d love to add a ceiling rose to our sitting room. It’s a big room, so adding a bit of interest might make the ceiling feel less vast. I’ve seen some second hand for fairly cheap, but a) I’m terrified of not installing it properly and a giant piece of plaster moments away from landing on our heads, and b) I don’t know how easily it would be to remove.
2. At the moment the light is positioned in the centre of the room. When we sit at our couch, the light is slightly behind us, therefore anything we’re holding or looking at is in shadow. It’s incredibly annoying. So adding a swag is the most obvious option. I’m hoping to acquire some wire much like our upcycled bedside lamp to keep cost [and waste] down.
3. Should we securely fix a ceiling rose to the ceiling, I’d like to also add a pretty hook for the swag. 
4. I bought a couple IKEA ledare bulbs when I was updating our hallway, and have already added one to our living room. They’re brilliant and light an entire room [unfortunately, IKEA don’t seem to be stocking them anymore. Welp].
5. Said IKEA bulbs are lovely, but there are times when it’s a bit too much. It’s either all or nothing at the moment in our living room. I’d like to hook the light up to a dimmer switch so there can be a happy medium. While I’m at it, I might as well get a pretteh one. I was thinking of getting a G O L D dimmer, but then that would make all our other switches jealous. We’ll see. The jury is still out. I’ve not had much luck finding one second hand, so this may have to be a new buy.

I’m still not sure on whether or not I’ll get an actual light fixture as I get very indecisive about them and more times than not end up returning them. I have bare-bulb syndrome. But having a bare bulb in our living room [like we do in our hallway] isn’t particularly obvious, so I’m fine with it. For now! 
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It really tied the room together

Me and rugs don’t have had a great history. First, there was the ethereal IKEA Stockholm rug I lusted after for so long. Being in a high traffic area and having two cats meant the rug went downhill rather spectacularly fast so I repaired it and sold it as it was not a rug suitable for our home [the rug was definitely the issue, Dude].
Then there was the dainty pink rug. I got it cheap. Real cheap. Second hand. From an online site where you advertise stuff you want to sell. Especially dirt cheap if you want to get rid of it fast. Yes, it was a bit small for our space, but it was cute! At first. Then it gave up on life and fell apart. It was cheap. I learned from my mistake. That rug went straight into the bin as it would have been of benefit to no one.

With the most excellent of timing, Wayfair.co.uk got in contact to work on another project this year [I worked with them last year on my lumberjack pillow tutorial that was featured in my broseph’s Canadian man cave office]. In return for my upcoming tutorial, I got to shop on the Wayfair.co.uk site and low and behold, their rug range is immense. 

Since I already have a lot of burgundy in our apartment and I’ve had a [failed] black and white rug, I wanted to go for something different yet would work with our apartment. I spied the Fusion Green Rug and thought about it for a couple of weeks. It was an incredible green with an imperfect navy pattern on it. It was a bit of a leap as I wasn’t sure exactly what colour it would be sans a sample, but my fingers were crossed on a deep viridian. It arrived yesterday, and boy did I luck out …

I am not just saying this because I am now the proud owner of it, but it’s an exquisite rug. It’s painfully luxurious and soft under foot. It’s also a very solid rug so it won’t warp like the IKEA Stockholm rug did. It passed the cat test and doesn’t shed or pull or distort like our disaster of a pink rug either. MASSIVE. SIGH. OF. RELIEF. I’m still up in the air as to flipping the rug 90 degrees so it’s running the other direction, but for now, it’ll more than do. 

Disclosure – Wayfair.co.uk sent me this rug free of charge in return for an upcoming project I’m working on for them [keep your eyes peeled as it’s a good one and involves a certain new movie being released next month!]. As always, all words and opinions are my own. I only work with companies I like and of course, think that you will too. Thank you for supporting the companies that support The Interior DIYer. 
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I’m just a worrier. That’s why my friends call me Whiskers*

Today’s a good day. Apologies in advance as today’s blog post is a bit of a therapy session …

In the beginning, before we signed the lease for our apartment, we told our letting agent that we had two cats. She said that was no problem. All was fine and dandy until our landlord came to visit two years later. Our letting agent frantically emailed us saying we had to hide our cats because our landlord didn’t know we had them. 
Queue infinite levels of stress, cleaning and arranging for the cats to be out of the apartment for hours leading up to our landlord visiting. Not to mention my epiphany that mentally destroyed me and pushed me into hyper-drive – what if our landlord’s allergic to cats? Well, you better scrub your fingers to the bone and make sure there’s no trace of the cats! Not even a hair. 

This fear mongering and general being thrown-under-a-bus-for-no-reason from our letting agent went on for years. I won’t get into the details, but she caused an insurmountable amount of stress for years. On one particular occasion involving the Irish Revenue and I was so anxious I became physically ill. I know to you, this probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if our landlord found out about our cats, we were told he would take action. 1) Ask us to leave [our rent is currently way below average for Dublin, praise science, so we want to stay as long as we can] and 2) keep our deposit. Or he could 3) ask us to simply get rid of our cats if we wanted to stay. It caused many sleepless nights. It sounds dramatic, but when you’re living it, it’s a very real worry. 

But today, today is a good day. The perfect conditions arose for me to tell our landlord about our cats [he’s no longer using said Letting Agent From Hell, and instead dealing with us directly], and guess what? He was totally cool with the cats. He actually laughed. He’s a decent person. Years. YEARS of unnecessary stress and for nothing. 

I’m having a giant drink with my lunch today. Maybe three.

Normal non-fear fueled blogging will resume next week as scheduled. Oh, and if you’re curious, you can creep all my crazy cat lady pictures of June and Tosh under the hashtag #JuniperAndToshi. Happiest of Fridays, homies xx  

*Thank you Mr. Ferrell for creating the most epic-ly appropriate blog title reference.