Back to the decorating....

A Happy New Year, somewhat belatedly, to everyone!

I haven't been near my desktop since Christmas and I shall soon be unable to get near it at all, as I will be decorating our office. I completed one corner and wall before Christmas, as we had a new unit to install, so I needed to paint that wall and wax the parquet under it. There had been a hideous 1970s G-Plan corner unit there for maybe the whole 15 years the previous owners were here, plus our three years, so it was rather dirty and horrible behind/underneath! We had inherited this unit but whilst it was handy for places to display photos and nicknacks, it didn't have enough actual storage and I wanted a unit where we could keep all our photography gear together, in some semblance of order! So I bought a unit from Ikea (of course). 😀

G-Plan is probably very trendy at the moment with this fixation on Mid Century Modern style, but having lived through that era and the pass me down furniture from it, to me the whole look is ugly and old fashioned. So shock, horror, the old unit is in pieces, a cupboard part of it is in the garage and the rest is being used as either spare bits of wood or going to the tip!

I now have to move desks and other bits of furniture around whilst painting the rest of the walls, which is going to be fun. Especially the tall cupboard full of our files which will weight a ton so will have to be emptied..... all this is the not so fun side of decorating.

I forgot to take a photo of the G-Plan unit but I'm sure most of you can imagine a horrible teak coloured 1970s wooden corner unit. 😀😀😀 

Here's the after shot for this corner now:

The wall paint is light blue, and I am going to paint white the cupboard in the next photo that you can just see with a 'wooden' front, because it has really silly handles which are too high up and difficult to grab hold of, so as I need to fill in the holes to install new, better handles, it will have to be painted to cover the filled in bits. It has black sides anyway which I don't like. The brown built in cupboards will stay like that as I like them and there are identical cupboards in the room next door to this, plus they match most of the internal doors in the house.

The rest of the 'before' shot:

I might even tidy up my desk, which is always a mess! By the way, the shelves above my desk were bought for a new kitchen we installed in 2003, two houses ago, which were never used in the end as they stuck out too much for the place I had planned to put them. So they had sat in the garage, forgotten about (by me anyway) until K mentioned them and hey presto - I think they work perfectly there!

Going back to Christmas, I didn't get around to posting my home made twig decorations, which I did once before, though I can't remember if it was last year or a few years back. I think these branches came from the same tree (I don't actually know what species!) but I'll have to leave it a couple of years to grow again as we took most of the young branches that K could reach even with a pole to grab them. 

I have lights in there too though they don't show up well in daylight. I love making home made decorations and I bought another little living table top tree from Lidl and changed their red decorations for lights and gold decorations, although they had some lovely white wooden stars which I kept on it. Hopefully I can use the tree for a few more years. 

Browsing in a shop at Xmas decorations last year I was pleased to see so many wooden decorations and no tinsel at all! I bought more pine cones and painted them white, gold and copper to go with the rest I had done last year with cones I'd gathered in the wild and displayed them in a blue glass bowl. 

In fact I have only just taken my decorations down as I've become more and more 'French' over the years, who don't follow the 12th Night rule at all, and take decorations down 'some time' in January, when it suits them. I put decorations up very late compared to most people but love having all the lights on in the evenings so I'm happy to wait until mid January until I take them down.

Well that's it for now, we have some day trips coming up with our birding group and I am starting to plan our summer holiday to Provence (timed to see the lavender fields over there) and we may be going on a two day trip up to the mountains for wild flowers, butterflies and birds with Birding Languedoc, in mid June. I have still to finish posting October's holiday photos so I will try to do that once my office is accessible again!