Time for Dates!

Happy Valentines Day! I'm not planning on talking about anything particularly romantic today. Because I'm boring and haven't done anything around the house that'sValentine-ish. Except...drawing a little heart on February 14th on the new calendar I made! And if you think about it, having a calendar is a very important part of remembering to celebrate Valentines Day...

My new calendar goes in my office. You can see it in its early stages here where I showed you my office gallery wall beginning to take shape. It's the frame on the right filled with orange.

Tom managed to find me a lovely large chunk of cork as an offcut from a cork flooring company for $35, which was much thicker and bigger than any other corkboards I could find. I marked it up so we could cut it into sections that would fit inside some of the frames on my wall...

And then Tom cut it up for me.

I then covered one of the pieces in an orange fabric sample that I'd added when I ordered my office curtain fabric, and put it in its frame, which I unfortunately don't have any photos of.

I then did a bit of playing around and came up with this basic calendar in Excel.

I've made the template available for download here. Just click on 'File' and then 'Download'. I used a font called 'Written on His Hands' for the name of each month, which can be downloaded for free here. And I used a font called 'Corbel' for the dates, which can be downloaded for free here.

So that I could see as much of the orange fabric as possible, I cut up all of the months into little squares, not being particularly careful about keeping them a uniform size.

 I had bought some plain gold drawing pins...

And then I pinned all my little squares to the cork behind the fabric. And took way too many photos of it!

I decided when I was making the calendar in Excel that I wouldn't just print the 2012 year, but give myself six months either side as well, just in case! And I just pinned them behind their 2012 counterparts, so that the months corresponded.

The leftover pins ended up in an old crystal glass. I don't know its original purpose - possibly a champagne glass? I'll need them for my other corkboards, which I'll talk about soon!

So there you have it. My little homemade calendar, that can be changed out in the future when necessary! I still don't have a proper 'after' shot of that office gallery wall, so I'll have to leave you with this horribly messy peek, which shows the calendar finished on the right.

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Too Much Crack

We've had an accident.

This is what our ugly aluminium window in the office used to look like. The plan was that we would eventually get some proper timber windows that actually match the house itself, but in the meantime, this window was functional, and it hasn't been a priority to overhaul it.

 And then it cracked. The crack starts about a third of the way up left side of the opening panel.

Here's a close-up.

Since this window gets opened and closed almost every day so I get some breeze through my office, having it fall to pieces on me wasn't a good prospect.

So we went and had a look at the window in the sleepout/verandah along that same wall. It looked the same size...

So we measured both panels, confirmed that they were very closely sized, and decided to switch them, since the window in the sleepout doesn't get opened very much.

But before we attempted to remove the broken window, we decided to take some safety precautions, donning a pair of heavy-duty gloves and a pair of trousers each to protect our arms. Perhaps not our most attractive safety gear!

And then we carefully slid the broken window off its tracks, hoping it would stay in one piece.

We got it out to the sleepout without a hitch, thankfully.

And then slotted the unbroken one into the track in the office.

And there it is! Like the crack never happened!

Unfortunately other cracks keep popping up all over the place...

But we'll deal with those as best we can. Back to the matter at hand! Obviously this window-swap isn't a permanent solution, and it's certainly not ideal to have a cracked window in the sleepout. But fortunately those windows are very high up, so we're not too worried about someone breaking into them, only the risk that the glass may break out and fall! Unfortunately we're stuck with that crack  until we open up the sleepout into a verandah and remove the windows entirely.

We'll deal with the other crack in other ways.

Curtain Dithering

Way back in the dark ages (i.e. last year), you may recall that I was dithering over whether I should go for this colour scheme for my home office...

Or this colour scheme!

I fairly quickly came to the conclusion that I was drawn to the first option much more than the second, but I wasn't convinced that the curtain fabric I had included in that mood board was the right one for us.

Terrain Bloom Seedpod

So I searched for alternatives. And I couldn't find anything that fitted the perfect image in my head! I considered this...

Amy Butler Love Laminated Trumpet Flowers Pink

I quite liked the scale and IKAT pattern on this cushion, but obviously the colours were wrong, and I couldn't find the fabric anywhere, as it was.

Sourced here

And I trawled the online fabric stores searching for the perfect one. Without luck. So, beginning to feel hopeless with indecision, I finally decided to make up this three-page comparison of my shortlist options. Yes, I'm a dork. Get used to it.

They're all options from The Ribbon Retreat, Fabric Traders and Fabric.com.

I looked and looked, and got Tom to look and look, and even got Daniel to look (or at least take half a look), and we eventually decided that my very first choice, the Terrain Bloom Seedpod, was in fact the best option after all!

Terrain Bloom Seedpod

I decided to slap down the credit card and take the plunge. It turned out that they only had 10 and 3/4 yards available, at $10.50 US a yard (yes, they're based in the US, so we were talking yards), so I bought the whole lot. $112.88 plus $76.67 in shipping later (although that shipping included some other fabric that I'll talk about later, so it wasn't all for the curtains), and I had my curtain fabric ordered!

I must confess that even now I'm still not entirely certain about it, but for four decent quality, slightly longer than usual curtain panels they're not extraordinarily expensive. After my fabric had already arrived, I did find this fabric option on Ebay that's probably almost exactly what I was looking for originally...

Of course that price is enough to scare anyone away! Well, anyone that doesn't make their curtain rods out of solid 24 carat gold, I'm sure. And it's for 10.5 yards of fabric, slightly less than I ordered. Yikes!

Another thing I discovered only very recently too, is the existence of Spoonflower! It's a website where you can design your own fabric! They charge $16.20 per yard so it's a bit more expensive than what I paid for my seedpods, but considering that you can have one-of-a-kind fabric that's exactly what you want, all I can say is "damn"! Wish I'd found them earlier!

But never mind, it's definitely not the end of the world, and I think I am liking my seedpods. Here's a sneak peek of what's to come...

Won't it be nice to finally have office curtains!!!!

Flanking the Oven

During our IKEA trip last week, you may remember that we spotted this guy, and decided to buy two of him to slot in on either side of our oven.

 Tom had fun unwrapping all of the bits and pieces...

And we held up our door choice against the existing doors, hoping that the height was close enough that we could get away with it. It's only a few millimetres shorter than the combined drawer and door next to it, so we think we can.

Then came the long process of assembling the cabinets (which actually wasn't all that long because Tom is the allen key master)...

Which, as hoped, are the perfect width!

The sliding drawers to go inside the cabinets took a bit longer to assemble...

But Tom got them in without a hitch. Allie insisted on having the first inspection.

She gives her approval! My beautiful girl.

Here's the problem. With the door attached, the new cabinets sit quite a bit out from the existing cabinets, even when we jam them as far into the wall as we can.

The cabinet on the left doesn't stick out quite as much as the one on the right (I blame the fact that nothing is square or straight in a timber house). Here's Tom measuring the difference.

So we had to make the call. Should we invest the energy into cutting off some of the back edge of each side of each cabinet so that it fits perfectly? We decided that we'd regret it forever if we didn't, since it really didn't look very good otherwise.

So Tom painstakingly marked how much had to come off each cabinet (this one's the cabinet on the right, which stuck out a lot)...

And then he pulled out the circular saw and cut into our brand new cabinets. A bit of a nerve-wracking exercise! We're getting surprisingly good at not stressing over making these kinds of permanent adjustments!

Then, with the two cabinets sitting snugly in the space, Tom needed to build a base for them to sit on to raise them up to the same level as the rest of our cabinets. We had some spare MDF cut to size from back when we originally built the bases for each of our existing sets of cabinets, so this was a comparatively easy part of the process.

And thankfully they slotted in perfectly.

Then it was finally time to install the cabinets once and for all, which involved a lot of very awkward power drill manouvreing.

And at long last (i.e. after what was pretty much a full day's work), the doors were on and they were done!

It's incredible how much more finished and connected the kitchen feels with those gaps on either side of the oven filled up. And you can hardly notice the fact that the new doors are slightly shorter, right? They should hopefully look nice and seamless once we paint all of the doors the same colour (I'm still thinking a dark grey) and replace all of the door hardware with something a bit fancier.

If you squint, and add an imaginary new benchtop and consistent paint colour on the cabinets, it's looking pretty great, isn't it?!

As you can see in the above photo, I've already started making use of the new cabinets for frying pan and saucepan storage, and they're really great! The pull-out drawers, much as they contributed $140 to the $245 overall cost of each cabinet, are well worth it. They make accessing everything so much easier!

So, one step closer to a proper pretty kitchen. And I can't wait!