Eco Cleaning

After my last post I felt motivated to take some action. I looked on line for eco products I could start introducing to my home. Not to go mad, but to order as needed. An online shop called Peace With The Wild looked good, so I placed a small order and with only £3.40 postage, it encouraged me more. I ordered loofer scouring pads, a coconut husk scraper for pans, a stick deodorant and some toilet cleaning powder. It was delivered in two days!

Our toilets are a real test for this toilet cleaner (which I’ve decanted for upstairs and downstairs) as we have very hard water which causes scale and staining, so it’s got to be good! I will report on the progress.

I plan to order more eco products as I run out of my other products. 🙂

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New Side Table

I’m delighted with what I’ve just made. I’ve made a side table for the lounge out of  vintage chemists box.

I found this box in the loft of our last house when we were moving and so decided to bring it with us. We’ve been using it to store sketch books and journals until now when we had a need for a new side table.

I’m really happy with it 🙂

Brightening Things Up (cont.)

Here’s an update on the fire place in our lounge.

It’s still not finished but we love it. Thanks to chalk paint we’ve been able to cover up the dark tiles very easily.

Here’s a reminder of what it looked like before.

An amazing transformation I think! 🙂

Brightening things up

We’ve been suffering with a dark fireplace ever since we have moved into our house fourteen years ago. We are having a new carpet, so it’s time for a change. I would like the room to be a little bit lighter and therefore feel a bit more spacious.

It’s amazing what a pot of chalk paint does to start the ball rolling!

It’s like a breath of fresh air

The carpet arrives on Wednesday so I’ll keep you posted on how things go 🙂

 

New Lamp Shade

One of my projects last week was to make new a very tatty lampshade.

I have a collection of used stamps and I have loads that I have accumulated that are no use in my collection, so the new project began.

After the laborious job of soaking the stamps of the paper of the envelopes, it was a fun and satisfying thing to do.

What do you think?

Now for the job of restoring the lamp base! 🙂

Fakenham Market Finds

As you may know, I kinda like wooden spoons.

Some for cooking

and some for looking at and admiring.

I found this one on the market for just £1.00, not for cooking I don’t think!

I might have a go at painting it and hang it on the wall 🙂

Home Improvements

I Hope you all had a fabulous Christmas, we did. We spend the last few days doing some home improvements which were long over due.

Improving our working environment started in October and then came to a halt because of work commitments, so it was all hands on deck to finish what we had started!

We had these shelves made from shelving we bought with us from our old house, so we decided to re-use it to save money.

They are so fab!

Over the fire place we’ve hung some outsider art bought from Barrington Farm which is a centre for  adults with learning difficulties here in Norfolk.

We now have a comfortable and improved working environment that we are happy with! 🙂

Wishing you all a very happy and simple New Year 🙂

Christmas

It’s very festive here at Hillside Lodge. It’s so nice when Christmas eve finally arrives.

 

There’s nothing more festive than making a fruit cake!

To everyone who watches my blog and all your family and friends, I wish you peace and joy this Christmas 🙂

Sempervivums

I just love Sempervivums, especially when they start flowering, these alien forms start appearing around the garden. I’ve been photographing them over the last few weeks just to show you.

One of the things I like is they are easy to look after and always evolving and easy to cultivate ’cause they have lots of babies. 🙂

Bees – the second instalment

Many of you know that we have had the problem of having bees in a chimney that we want to use and we didn’t want to kill the bees (which was most peoples solution). We found a nice man who loves bees and was prepared to try to remove them for us without killing them. Yesterday he turned up at the door at 8 am to do the job.

I didn’t take photos of him partly dismantling our chimney!… but this is only part of a jackdaws news he found in there.

In the process of clearing the chimney our office was quite alive with bees.
Considering the amount of bees, there was only a small piece of comb that had honey in it, small but a real gift!
We extracted almost a jar of honey from it.
We now have, after a very busy and tiring day, a clear chimney ready to fit our wood burner my in laws have kindly given us 🙂