Oil Me Up!

So it's that time of year again when the sun comes out for three days in a row, and I bake outside on the balcony with a good book while Kevin stays inside swearing at his X-Box.  Yay summer!

Our balcony flooring survived the long winter and rainy (so rainy!) spring, but was looking a bit duller than this time last year. 

We popped to Homebase to look for some oil suitable for outdoor use and the cheapest they had was their own brand Teak Oil, less than a fiver.  This made us very happy, because a few weeks ago we spent about £15 on oil for the kitchen worktop (post coming soon!) and we were expecting to pay a lot more for the outdoor stuff.  Anyway, this Teak Oil says it's suitable for using on outdoor furniture, and we sit on the floor all the time so it totally counts.

It said to apply it on a day when it wouldn't be raining (hah, why are they selling it here then?!) so after a week or so we had fine weather forecast for a couple of days, but it wasn't so sunny that we'd be missing precious outdoor time too much. 

I whacked some of the oil in a jug, grabbed probably the only clean paintbrush we have, and got to work.

Check out my giant thumb, it's like the size of three fingers!

You can see the difference it made immediately:

The oil smelt delicious to me, but I do really like fumey smells, and Kevin didn't like the smell so I shut the door while I was working until I got to the last bit.  It only took about half an hour, if that, and then it looked all lovely and slick and shiny.

I do still need to do a small patch where I put the plant pots out of the way, but other than that, behold now the oil has soaked in and done its job:

This will hopefully last another year.  It does say to do it every six months, but our balcony is quite sheltered and I'm quite lazy.

Also, after the passion flower we had on the trellis got frosted to death, I bought a shiny new clematis, and it's still alive and growing strong! 

It keeps trying to grow towards the door, and I think it wants to eat us, but that might just be be my imagination after reading this Kenneth Ireland book as a child...

Happy 2013!

To celebrate, we've decided to return to blogging!  Also, we actually got off our arses and have stuff to blog about!  Only one of those statements is true!  And now I have to stop putting exclamation marks at the end of my sentences!  Or not!  Haha!  Okay, enough now really.

So, I have a multitude of things to update you about, but I don't think there are any that are amazingly spectacular, so don't get too excited.  I misled  you with all the exclamation marks, didn't I?  Sorry.

Anywho...  here is a list of things we've been doing:

• The living room mantelpiece has been put back together and screwed back to the wall, but no pics yet because we haven't hung the mirror.  There'll be a post coming shortly.  Here's a nice before shot for you though:
  
  
  
  
  

  The cardboard was taped to the brick to keep the draught out while we built a nice wooden insert to do that job permanently.  

• The hall has been painted, but I don't have any pictures of it newly done yet, so there may be a post about that in a week or so;

• The bathroom and toilet have been painted, panelled and prettified and are almost finished apart from the missing doors (bathroom cupboard and toilet), which are likely to be missing for a little while longer, so that's another future post.  Here are a couple of before pics for you to see what we were dealing with (warning, they're not pretty!):
  
  
  
  
  This is where the sink goes... I like that it looks like some kind of alien trying to break through with his little wavy arms.
  
  
  
  
  

  This is the toilet, obviously, with its beautifully stained/painted concrete floor.  I bet this went well with the dark purple walls and bright green door that we found underneath layers of paint.  Ahem.
  
  

  

  
  No, this is not carpet in the bathroom, this is coving in the living room.  To go in the bathroom.  Which it did.  And you will see photos that prove this.  Eventually.

  
  

• Kevin has bought a nice shiny plane to use on various doors to make them fit, but still has yet to use it due to lack of space, which will be solved once we finish the spare room.  I'm sure once he's used it he'll want to tell you all about it.  I'm very sorry, but I don't have a picture of the plane (I know you're just dying to see it) and I'm not about to go searching for it in the disorganisation that is our spare room.  It's very pretty, you'll just have to take my word for it.
  

• Way back in the summertime, when the weather was fine, Kevin screwed this lovely piece of trellis to our balcony wall.  There is currently a passion flower growing all over it (thanks Kevin's dad!) and so far it has survived all that winter has had to throw at it.  Except that this week we're half a foot deep in snow, and now that I've jinxed it it definitely won't make it, but still, 6 months is a looooong time for a plant in this place! 
  
  Here's a mildly amusing story; when we bought the trellis we forgot that we only have a tiny little car and struggle to fit anything larger than a couple of shopping bags in it at a time.  So we bought the (fairly large) trellis, and then had to ring my uber-generous mum to come and get it from us in the Homebase car park and drive it all the way to our flat in her not so tiny car.  I hope you think it was worth it Mum, you've helped us keep a plant alive!
  
  

• The spare room is a lot clearer and will be painted this week(!) so expect that post in a couple of years days, but until then, here's a before picture from ages ago.  It was even worse when we decided to clear it out.
  
  
  
  
  This is the before pic, obviously.
  
  
  
  
  And this is the what it looks like after moving a shedload of stuff to the shed (haha) and driving three car loads to the tip.  Still not amazing, but waaaaaay better than before, and only full of stuff we need now!  Soon to have my old bed in it.  (I promise Mum and Dad, we will get it from you in the next two weeks.  Your six years of waiting is finally over!!!!)
  
  And now, for your viewing pleasure, the AMAZING colour that the former owners decided would look good in a bedroom.  I have to add this wasn't a child's bedroom, and to top it off, the paint is insanely shiny.  It's migraine inducing, I swear.  Also, note how they didn't bother to do anything about the clashing former wallpaper behind the radiator, so this is the view when you walk into the room.  Stunning.  It's gone now though; as soon as the room was clear enough two coats of white paint went over that hideousness, and we're off out tomorrow, weather permitting, to pick up the new paint colour, woo!
  
  

So that's seven months' worth of work, which really doesn't seem to amount to much when you put it all in one blog post.  Best get back to it, I suppose!

Let's Go Outside...

In honour of the sun coming out and actually staying out for more than a couple of hours we've been making our outside area as pretty as possible.  We already have our plants, and our first flower, but we wanted to make the space more inviting, seeing as we'll be spending a lot of time out there now summer's begun.

The first flower of summer, ain't she purty!

We had ummed and ahhed over what to do about the concrete floor since we bought the flat.  It's nothing horrific to live with, but it does have a weird large paint stain that's sort of indented into the concrete (no idea how it happened) so it's a wee bit unsightly.

 My feet are totally there for size reference, 

not because I can't take photos properly.  Honest.

Our first thought was Astroturf; my parents had it in their back garden when I was very little, and our upstairs neighbour actually has it on his balcony now and it looks pretty cool.  We had looked into it a few years ago, but it was too expensive for what we wanted to pay back then, and despite hunting on ebay for a few weeks we couldn't find any cheap offcuts that would fit our quite large balcony (it's 4.25m by 1.15m (14' by 3'9" in old money).

At our recent trip to the garden centre we had seen samples of Astroturf, but we decided the one that we liked (i.e. the cheapest one that didn't just look like shredded green plastic bags) was still too expensive at around £25 per square metre (we'd need at least 5 square metres, and it would probably have joins  somewhere due to the long, thin shape of our balcony).

Then, a few weeks ago I saw a picture on Pinterest of Platta flooring tiles from Ikea, and fell in love.  I spoke to Kevin about it and he loved the flooring too, but when we I did some calculations on how much it would cost we I worked it out to be around £280, far too much for us to pay.

 Pic from ikea.com

The only other option that we could think of was to paint the floor dark green and hope that that would make it look at least a bit nicer than the concrete, but Kevin really wasn't keen on the idea, and after mulling it over he decided that we should spend the money and get the Platta flooring, seeing as when we move we can just take it with us and reuse it.

So we did some more calculations, and learnt a very important lesson: always do your calculations at least twice, especially if you're us me.  It turned out our my original calculations were far from correct and that we'd actually only need 5 or 6 packs at £16.99 to cover the whole balcony.  Huzzah!  So yesterday we zoomed off to Ikea and picked up 5 packets, which we laid yesterday afternoon.  It took us around an hour and half, and an hour of that was sweeping the balcony and moving the plants and potting shelves around, with another 20 minutes cutting some of the tiles to fit.  All in all, the actual laying the tiles only took around 10 minutes!  We had to go back today for an extra pack to finish off the edges, but that only took another 10 minutes of cutting tiles when we got back.

The flooring tiles look like this on top:

and like this underneath:

and just clip together like this:

Can you see where the little pegs just fit in the holes?  It's as easy as that.

Our balcony is exactly 3 1/2 tiles wide so we had to cut some tiles in half and snip some of the joining pieces off the edges for a snug fit.  It says on the instructions to use a saw to cut the tiles, but I tried a pair of secateurs to snip through the plastic and they worked perfectly, so we just did them that way.

Anyway, without further ado, here are some before and after shots of the balcony:

Can you tell we haven't been out there for a while?!

Ta-daaaaah!

Those are the outdoor cushions with the covers that I made from the same fabric I made my tote bag with (I made them about a month ago but the weather went bad so we haven't used them outside until now).

That's a little close up of our 'gardening area', all  nice and tidy and spider-free now, thanks to Kevin <3.  Our little bee house is out there, but we still have no takers.  Maybe our super sophisticated new flooring will attract some posh bees...

It's so nice out there now.  The floor makes such a huge difference, and looks way more expensive than it actually is (it cost a total of £101.94), and we can take it with us when we go!  It also needs very little maintenance, just oiling twice a year, which we do with our coffee table and chopping board anyway so it's just an extra thing to add to that list, and it should be quite enjoyable to do on a nice day outside.  It also has the added bonus that we can move it if we need to do any particularly messy jobs outside, such as sanding or spray painting.  All in all I think we've found our perfect floor (can you tell how much we love it?!).

We've been doing lots of other little bits and pieces (and a couple of big bits and pieces) of DIY, some of which should be finished very soon, so we'll have some more updates in a few days (I think I always say that and then don't update for weeks, but I really mean it this time!).  But right now I'm off to bed so I can wake up extra early and have breakfast outside, woo!

The Plants, the Bag and the Wardrobe (not necessarily in that order)

On Tuesday it finally stopped showering for long enough for me to plant up the rest of our new plants, and today I've finally stopped procrastinating for long enough to actually write a post about it.

It took a lot less time than I expected, primarily because I didn't actually have to replant the lavender or the pieris, as the plastic pots they were in fitted perfectly into the decorative pots we already had, so that took all of five minutes.  I did plant the sweet peas in a new pot, complete with trellis jammed in the back for them to climb up.  I've put them all together in one large plant pot, I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not, but I can always move some of them to another pot if it gets too crowded.  Anyway, without further ado, les plants:

Sorry for the close-up-ness of the picture, our balcony's only just over a metre wide so it's the best I could manage.

Progress on the wardrobe is slooooow, mostly due to me.  I thought I was being really clever in painting the back of the doors first so that the front wouldn't be subject to drips coming through when I painted the back.  Except while I was painting the back first, I wasn't checking for drips on the front.  Cue a tonne of drips.  So many I nearly wept, but instead I thought maybe painting over them might make them less obvious.

Long story short, it didn't, so yesterday morning I first tried sanding them down and then when that didn't work I got Kevin's amazing razor scraper and scraped them all off.   Luckily repainting over the bare patches where drips used to be looks way less obvious than the drips did, but it's taken a long time (waiting for coats to dry properly so I don't mess it up again) and I'm a couple of days behind on my plan.  Oh well, I foresee a lot of sanding and painting in the spare room this weekend, and perhaps sometime next week a white wardrobe?  I really hope so!

I also did a little bit of sewing this week, made myself a nice new tote bag using this pattern, from some on sale, super cheap Ikea bed linen (not actual linen, poly cotton, but still).  So that's another thing from my Things to Make and Do board that I've done.  That's two in one week!  Woo!

I'm going to use the rest of the fabric to make some covers for our enormous outdoor cushions, and we're going to Ikea this weekend (Kevin doesn't know this yet, I bet it makes his day, haha) to look at some possible decking for the balcony floor.  All we'll need then is for summer to arrive, and hopefully last longer than two weeks!

I Like My Women Like I Like My Coffee... Covered In Bees!

Now that summer is nearly here we've decided to go gardening crazy!  If only we had a garden *sigh*.  We do have our balcony though, on which many a plant has succumbed to lack of watering / aphids that just won't die.  We were out enjoying the sun a couple of weeks ago (remember that sun... where did it go?) when a lovely fat bumble bee came to visit us.  It was love at first sight for Kevin, who now wants as many as possible to come and enjoy our balcony with us.

To say I'm not very good with plants would be a huge understatement.  Everything that's been out on our balcony has died, and at the moment we have four houseplants, two of which are succulents, and they're only all alive because they're indoors so we notice when they need watering.  So whenever I get all excited and suggest to Kevin that we should get loads of pretty flowers for our balcony he just flat out refuses, which is probably a good thing.  However, now he's all excited about bees, he's the one doing the suggesting, and I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth, so on Saturday we spent a couple of hours at our local garden centre looking for some bee friendly plants.

We'd done some highly scientific research beforehand into what would attract bees (i.e. looked on the internet a bit and asked my mum, thanks Mum!) and apparently they like blue flowers, because they can mainly see colours at the blue end of the spectrum.

Anyway, after about an hour-and-a-half wandering around the plant section we came home with these beauties:

• 10 trailing light blue Lobelias
• 6 F1 blue Petunias
• 1 blue Scabiosa
• 1 white and pink Campanula
• 1 purple Sweet Pea
• 1 pink Sweet Pea
• 1 Pieris (forest flame)

The garden centre had very helpfully put some 'Bee Friendly' stickers on some of the plants, and the others we bought because we saw bees landing on them while we were there.

I am madly in love with the Forest Flame (the tall one at the back with the pink leaves).  It's my new favourite thing in the whole flat, so I'm gonna be uber-careful not to kill it!

I planted half of the plants today in two lots of tiered planters.  Space is at a premium on our balcony, so when I saw the idea of making your own tiered planters on this website I pinned it on my things to make and do board, and it's the first thing on there that I've actually done (woo, go me! haha).

I still have the sweet peas and the pieris to plant up tomorrow, along with a gorgeous lavender plant that my mum got us (thanks again Mum!), but without further ado, our new tiered planters:

Bee's-Eye View

The lobelias are in the bottom tier, petunias in the middle and then the scabiosa and campanula in each top pot.  The lobelias are trailing, so hopefully they'll spread out and down over the pot, I'm really excited to see what they look like when the plants are blooming.

I shall post pics of the rest of the plants tomorrow when they're all nicely potted up and I've swept the balcony a bit (compost gets everywhere), and hopefully, possibly, maybe, by the end of this week there may be a white wardrobe in the spare room.  Maybe.