Guest post: Home Lighting

If you are a lover of home lighting and just know that every colour has it’s own temperature and each room conveys its own feeling and emotions, then you need to be thinking about bulbs.

The relatively unsexy and lets be honest ‘dull’ light bulb is often an overlooked part of home and interior lighting design.

Technology has moved on and LED lighting has changed a lot of lighting designs.

More and more LED lit light fittings are appearing in product ranges all the time.Major UK designer Franklite confirmed their plans to me this week on Twitter: “Ultimately LED is the way to go.”

These once costly-to-make lights do make energy saving differences and their incandescence when lit is unique.

All White for 2013?

A lot of  designers are  talking about white in 2013 and how it will be incorporated into backgrounds. The Pantone charts for next year do have lots of white and crème variants. So expect to see it feature heavily in designs next year.

The excellent  Laura Bielecki is well worth looking up she did a sneak peak into design trends back in September.

White is great with LED lighting, the main difference with LED and conventional bulbs is that they emit light in one direction and not in the all round way of a standard bulb. This makes them perfect for feature focus and for softening blocks of colour in a room.

This year we saw a lot of manufactures and designers creating ranges of paired wall lighting some simple and some striking in their design. Paired lights make a great alternative to overhead lighting and lamps, and of course are ideal for the classic dimmer switch.

The materials used to make lamp shades was a big focus for designers in 2012 some exquisite frosted glass, paper and metal designs appeared. Check Out the Foscarini range to get an idea.

We can expect to see this influence filter into high streets and stores next year. In particular companies like Franklite have come up with a range of overhead lighting with large metallic shades.

Fun, whimsy and romance seem to be all part of the design vogue for next year. Somewhere along the line design and home crafts are set to meet in your home.

So have fun experimenting with lighting, one of the tricks of the trade is to draw a room map to experiment where furniture and lighting can be placed to best effect. From there you can work out how a room will actually be used and how you would like to light it.

Images credited to www.franklite.net

Author Bio
My name is Simon and I run Easylighting.co.uk from my base in Norfolk a little place called Long Stratton you have probably never heard of. We are a home lighting specialist and do all our business on line.

Our tenth anniversary is at the end of November we wanted to do something special for our customers.  From Monday the 26th November through to Saturday 24th we will be giving away lighting on our Facebook page.  

Foodie Penpals: Liquorice love

I was thrilled with my foodie penpal box this month!

It was sent over by Lucy from Leeds. When she first emailed me about it she asked how I felt about liquorice. My experience of it was of crappy sweets from our village sweet shop that I never really liked. However, I'd never really tried proper liquorice.

Well, what came through in the post blew my mind. The box contained all sorts of goodies including an ice cube tray in tea shapes (iced tea!), which may have been the reason for our weather getting so good. The box also included hibiscus flowers and an accompanying recipe, Mexican fajita mix, organic bay leaves, olives and some amazing tea.

Firstly, let me talk about the liquorice. These Pontefract cakes were amazing. I didn't know that liquorice was so soft! I've found a new sweetie love. It took a lot of willpower not to devour these in one go.

Lucy also included some liquorice root. I had no idea it was grown. In her accompanying letter she said there used to be a huge field of it between Leeds and Pontefract and the roots are six feet long. I'm now a liquorice expert and lover. I'm hoping that because it's from a root it's healthy... maybe not.

I've been raving about this tea since it arrived. It's After Dinner Tea with fennel and peppermint to help support a healthy digestive system. Lucy also sent empty tea bags (!) because its loose leaf. However, I recently purchased a new teapot so it's been seeing a lot of action.

I was worried the tea might be a little too pepperminty for me but it is glorious. The routine in my house is cook dinner, eat, drink After Dinner Tea. It's only right.

If you weren't sold on Lucy's genius by now then please take a look at her fennel, chilli and black mustard oatcakes. For which she rendered her own lard! I was infinately impressed before I'd even tried them. They had a really moist and subtly meaty flavour but then the other flavours kick in. They're so wonderful they're had to describe.

It's safe to say these were gone almost instantly. They boyfriend got to try a corner of one before I scoffed them all.

Thank you, Lucy! 

You should all check out her blog Offally Good.

Guest Post: Foodie Swap

As part of the Foodie Penpal swap I got to send Dan a box of goodies from Norfolk. Here's his post about the experience.

First of all let me thank Jess for hijacking her blog, being blogless and this being my first foodie penpal contact I’m hesitant to start up a blog as I don’t feel I can commit my time to maintaining something on a weekly basis (unless the blog was exclusively about LoLcats, bikes and on account of having a four year old daughter, iCarly).

Jess’s package came through this morning and I was very pleasantly surprised with what I received, all exclusively products made in Norfolk.

First off I received an epic bar of Rocky Road Gnaw (made in Gnorfolk according to the packet). I’m saving this bad boy for a rainy day, it looks too good just to fritter away on anything but a Ghost/Beaches/Dirty Dancing marathon.

Next up was the delicious Norfolk Garden Rose Hip Extra Jelly Preserve. This was an amazing surprise, not normally a massive fan of Jam or Preserves the taste and consistency is amazing, sweet but with a freshness at the back, in some ways reminding me of when you bite into a toffee apple. I paired this up with a very crumbly Wensleydale on a Carr’s water biscuit and the combination was fantastic.

Finally in an already fantastic package was a bottle of pure evil called Inferno, a Smokey Naga Chilli Sauce. Needless to say this sauce is HOT, that said once the heat dissipates it gives way to a brilliant flavor profile of tomato, smokey chipotle and BBQ sauce.

Taking the Inferno for a spin I opted for my favorite brunch of Scrambled Eggs on Toast with smoked salmon, but instead of the compulsory Tabasco I opted to caramelize my smoked salmon in a small amount of the sauce, needless to say this is how I’ll be making scrambled eggs from now on.

Somewhat spicier than the standard I normally make the Inferno complemented the Eggs and toast really well, with an initial heat quickly toned down by the creaminess of the eggs as well as the other piquant flavors from the sauce elevating the butter (tip: always put too much butter in your scrambled eggs – your palate will thankyou for it!).

All that’s left for me to say sincere thanks to Jess for the package and I hope one day I can return the favor!

Swivel chair

This is utterly perfect. I need it in my life. £549 from Made.com

Want: Jersey Sofa

This sofa is £299 and I can just envision it in our conservatory next to the book case. It would give it a well needed pop of colour and it looks comfortable too. We have that money in our savings. Can I buy it. Please?

I know we should pay off all the things we've already bought but I want this. It's from the glorious, wonderful, brilliant Made.com

I was allowed giraffe-print...

We painted our bedroom black and blue/grey, our orange headboard no longer matched. Not that I'm sure it every match anything.

I've been toying with the idea of covering it for a while but really had no idea where to start. My mum offered to help so we set out to go shopping. In the fabric shop I was joking about how I wanted black and silver leopard print but Ben would kill me if I got such a thing.

Now, Ben was supposed to join us in fabric shopping but stayed in bed with a hangover. I briefly ran the giraffe print by him via text message. He reluctantly agreed but still seemed unsure. My animal-print-love was taking over...

While Ben and I cooked curry the following evening for my mum and step-dad, they covered the headboard. So I didn't actually get to do the bit I was looking forward to. However, this means I didn't have the chance to muck it up as no doubt I would've done.

So, tah-dah! The newly-covered headboard actually matches now and I feel a little bit happier with the co-ordination of the bedroom. Ben loves it too, you'll be pleased to know.

The computer room part II

You may remember we recently painted the computer room.

The idea was that it was a blank canvas. Simple and grey (try to edit out the blue carpet, I still hate it.) We were going to cover the walls in awards, posters, geekery and rockness.

We've got our computers in and we've finally got around to getting some gorgeousness on the walls.

We have all these grand plans for displaying my records and we want to fill the walls. We also have our eye on some Star Trek prints from Etsy. (These could potentially be our Valentine's/anniversary present to each other). The question is, do we get Picard, Riker and Data or Kirk and Spock. Decisions!

And here it is now! It looks so much better (and the computers have been set up) but there's still loads to do. My guitar needs somewhere to live, I have loads of records I want on display, I'd like a huge corner desk and perhaps some more seating.

This is a ghost of my rock past. Set lists, signatures, promo CD and vinyl sleeves and so on. To the left of the rock pinboard is the left overs from my Darkling days. I am, and always will be, a Darkness fan. But when I was 15 I was going to every gig of theirs I could get to, getting photos, collecting tickets and meeting amazing people. As a result, I've collected loads of stuff and taken loads of pics. These collages are constant reminders of what an amazing time I had, the people I met and how amazing that music makes me feel.

The wall behind where I'm standing to take this pic is bare and the room looks huge now we've moved some boxes out of it. I sort of want to leave it that way. At least it doesn't echo in there any more!

I can't help but feel that now there's stuff in here the blue carpet works better. It's also the warmest room in the house for some reason!

Buying furniture

Having bigger rooms and, indeed, new rooms. It's about time we bought some more furniture. I have plans for a reading corner in the conservatory. So Ben and I popped to Homebase to procure a bookcase. We found a lovely flatpack one for £50.

We went into the store to have a look around. After much deliberation and purchasing something else on a whim (more about that below) we came away with a bookcase. We put it together last night and it looks great in the conservatory. We just need to unpack our remaining books into it.

The impulse buy

Whilst looking around the furniture section we saw a lovely extending dining table that came with six chairs. It was reduced from £750 to £429 and if we bought it on a Homebase card then we'd get an extra 20% off. Seemed perfect.

Upon saying we wanted to buy it we found out it was no longer available for delivery but they'd check in the warehouse. Table came up as did four chairs. That was all the chairs they had but we were told we might be able to take two display chairs.

Another problem soon arose. There were no legs for the table. They should've been in another box but our Homebase and the one down the road didn't have them. We were a bit baffled by this but we were told it was probably because a table was repaired with those legs sometime in the past.

We were then offered the whole display set with six chairs but the table was quite badly damaged. We told the store manager no and that we'd just take the bookcase.

He then said that if we looked through the catalog he might be able to do us a deal on another table we liked.

Of course, I stopped on the massive, solid oak £750 table with six amazingly shaped chairs. Worth a try.

We eventually got the table, six charcoal fabric chairs and the bookcase for £540 including delivery. Solid oak rather than oak veneer, stunning chairs and a cheaper bookcase. Homebase were very helpful and the manager did us an amazing deal. Can't wait for the table to arrive!

Before and after: Painting - The computer room

All we've managed to paint so far is the computer room and our bedroom. Everything else will have to wait until we've unpacked. I honestly do not believe how much crap I own.

The computer room


This is the second bedroom, used by the previous owners to house their two boys. The paint was scuffed, the electricity sockets broken, chunks taken out of the plaster and drawings on the walls. It needed painting it looked so grubby.

We decided to go for a relatively neutral colour so we could hang all sorts of geeky dren on the walls. The room started off like this. Cream and grubby.

We chose some Dulux One Coat paint as we are lazy. Egyptian Cotton is the colour. Here's our brilliant cutting in....

And the transformation!

I'm so much happier with how it looks now! It's cleaner, we've filled in any holes in the plaster, we've glossed the skirting boards and fixed the broken socket. Computers are in now on a horrible hand-me-down desk. We are hoping to get Unique Woodwork to build us a pretty corner desk with tons of storage and loads of space for all our techy bits.

The next stage is putting all the geeky stuff on the walls. We have our eyes on Kirk and Spock prints on Etsy.

The first electric Rayburn

I thought that once I'd bought my own snazzy cooker I wouldn't be that bothered by all the others out there. Wrong. I'm obsessing again. At least this model is £1000s out of my price range.

The Rayburn Electric

Features

• Touch-sensitive controls and a single ceramic glass cooking surface
• Choice of induction or ceramic hobs with square or dome hinged lids
• With two 2.3kW burners, the induction hobs have excellent response times
• Ceramic hobs use the latest infra-red technology to give rapid heating and cooling
• Two thermostatically controlled ovens give a wide choice of cooking modes
• 43-litre capacity top oven
• Patented ‘Warmfront’ technology
• 3-year parts and 1-year labour warranty
• Standard 910mm x 980mm dimensions
• Available in a variety of colours – Cream, Black, Dark Blue, British racing Green, Pewter and Aqua

What I've learned since buying a house

Since buying a house and having to decorate it I've learned a lot about how it feels to be a home ower as well as about DIY. Here are a few things I've learnt in the last two weeks.

• When painting a room work from the top down. Do the ceiling and coving followed by walls then skirting boards.
• You have to gloss a skirting board (no emulsion allowed) and there's lots of sanding involved
• Buy good value gloss that dries quickly
• We need a drill
• I like cleaning a house I own
• Owning a house is exhausting
• Wired networks are exciting
• I like black feature walls and lots of grey
• I LOVE cooking
• I'm better at glossing skirting boards than Ben is
• Painting is much easier when the parents visit and all I have to do is make tea and lunch

The end of the Christmas baking

Last post I introduced you to phase one of the Christmas baking. That was just the trial run. On Christmas Eve we spent all day cooking. We made, more or less, the same things as shown in the previous post and luckily it went rather well.

Benny rolling out the peppermint creme dough

We ended up using roughly more than 2 kilos of icing sugar

To make approximately 400 peppermint cremes you need six egg whites and a lot of icing sugar. We used about 2.5 kilos.

Pop the egg whites in a bowl then slowly add sifted icing sugar. Once it starts to come together add a little peppermint essence. About two cap fulls from a small bottle should suffice but feel free to taste it and add more if you want to. Keep mixing and adding until it begins to form a stiff dough. If it's sticky add more sugar.

Once it's in dough form you should be able to roll it out. We split it in two and added green food colouring to one half. This just made our Christmas bags of cremes look a little more interesting once we were done. 

Cover a flat surface with icing sugar so the dough doesn't stick and roll until it's around 5mm - 1cm thick. Then cut it out into pretty shapes. Pop the finished shapes onto grease-proof paper and leave to dry for around 24 hours.

We cut out some stars, holly leaves, circles and hearts.

I have to say, we didn't allow ours to stand for that long as we were in a rush to get them bagged up. In our warm kitchen they seemed hard enough within eight or so hours.

The green peppermint dough

We originally found a recipe for peppermint cremes that said to add double cream. Ben was adamant that his mum, who makes fantastic everything, didn't use cream. He was right so we omitted that ingredient and went with the above recipe which comes entirely from her!

Cheese biscuits

For this bout of cheese biscuit creation we doubled our original recipe to 200g cheddar cheese, 200g flour and 200g butter. That made around 70, a mixture between the big paprika'd ones and the little ones.

Honeycomb 

We normally really struggle with honeycomb but on attempt eight it went right. The perfect amount of crunch, sweetness and stickiness. 

The honeycomb went perfectly!

Our bagged up snowballs

The finished product filled with cheese biscuits, peppermint cremes, snowball cookies and honeycomb!

Christmas Baking

With a new oven we thought baking would be a doddle. No more uneven heat, eternal cooking times, burning or underdone food.

Well, the cooking part of the baking went well but we struggled with temperatures, dough and butter.

Sugar and Golden Syrup melting over a low heat

Here we attempt Honeycomb Toffee (like what you get in a Crunchie) from a Nigella recipe. We've attempted this six times and all times, including last night, we have failed. Last night's failures were first because the mixture got too hot and burned before we put in the bicarb then the second batch we panicked and took it off the heat too early. At least the second is edible. It is crunchy to begin with but soon turns to sticky, chewy toffee in your mouth.

It's lovely but not exactly what we were going for.

Benny, our new kitchen and, in the background, our wonky blackboard

We then made simple cheese biscuits, which I forgot to photograph. Just mix 100g mature cheddar cheese, 100g flour and 100g butter together until it forms a stiff dough. If it goes all crumbly like mine did last night just add a little more softened butter until you can roll it out.

Cut out shapes and lay on a greased baking tray, sprinkle with a little paprika for decoration and bake at 180 degrees for 15-20 mins.

Snowball cookies in the process of being rolled in icing sugar

We also made Snowball Cookies. These looked really simple to make just 100g of softened butter mixed with 75g of icing sugar to make buttercream (I was tempted to stop here and just eat the butter cream) then combine that with 150g of flour, 25g chopped almonds, 25g chopped walnuts and the zest of a lemon.

That should then apparently form a dough. No such luck. It was just crumbly and would not stick together. I ended up putting in at least another 100g of butter. It then has to sit in the fridge for 30 mins. Afterwards roll into little balls and put on a greased baking tray. Bake for 10-12 mins in a preheated over at 180 degrees.

We popped our fan oven to 160 degrees and kept checking them. The total cooking time was probably about 15 mins. 12 wouldn't have been enough but 15 might have been a little too long.

Then roll all the balls in icing sugar until they look like snowballs! They are quite delicious.

Messy work

I don't think I am a natural baker. I don't like getting messy and dough under my finger nails was a pain but I enjoyed this bout of cooking. Even if it was peppered with difficulty and failure. Also, I love our new kitchen, it's fantastic to work in!

Guest Post: Time to move on

Friend and fellow moving-house-a-week-before-Christmas-nutcase Ali Bunn shares her experiences of the house buying process. 
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I moved into my horrid little council flat in March 2010. My husband (who was my boyfriend at the time) had been living there with his daughter for just over two years. It's your typical council flat - two damp bedrooms, a damp bathroom (with no bath!), a long damp lounge/diner, a small damp kitchen and no garden. The wardrobe in the master bedroom has been converted into a production studio and there's barely room to swing a rat. The first thing I did when I moved in was paint the lime-green lounge deep chocolate and coffee, but that's where the alterations ended. I couldn't envisage myself living there for long, it has never felt like my place and I hate it. Still, I've been there 21 months. 21 long, horrible months.

I'm lucky enough (if you can call it that?) to have inherited a share of a house in Windsor, which I subsequently sold to one of the other shareholders. This put my husband and I in an unusual position. We had (just) enough money to buy ourselves a house outright, no mortgage, no huge debt. We started looking in September and it was the second house we saw that we fell for. Big kitchen, three bedrooms (one for all the husband's studio stuff) and even a shed in the garden. The kid's favourite part of the house was the glittery toilet seat, I like that it has a bath.

You'd have thought being cash buyers would make things quick and simple. There's no chain either side, we have the cash in the bank, they have somewhere to move to, the survey was fine, the searches were fine, everything seems so easy and simple. No such luck. Our offer was accepted at the end of September, we get the keys on 15th December. A staggering 12 weeks. 

So why the delay? Our solicitors kept saying "We''re waiting for things from the vendor's solicitor". I'm sure the vendor is being told the same thing. It's not to make more money, they get a flat fee for dealing with conveyancing. Maybe they just want their boss to think they're busy?

Still, the end is in sight. We've paid our deposit and on Wednesday the HUGE balance of £112,500 will be transferred and we will be the proud owners of Number 12. We've got our insurance ready to kick in the moment we get the keys (can you imagine not getting it sorted? Sods law says the second you get the keys, the house burns down and all that money would be lost), Sky is booked to install a dish, utilities transferred, council informed, Christmas cards with change of address included have been sent. Totally, utterly, completely prepared.

Oh no, should I start packing?!

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You can read more from Ali over at http://bunnthebaker.blogspot.com

The average age of a first time buyer is 38-44

I came across a granny blog that was talking about how older couples were being pushed out of their homes to make way for young families. Read the post if you are interested because the part that caught my eye was the average age of a first time buyer.

I'm 23 and my boyfriend is 26. We've just bought our first home.

I can't think what would push the average up to 38-44. Is it that young people are so in debt that they can't afford to save, does no one see the merits of buying a house until that late in life, do people have better things to save for?

Things get complicated

We popped over to The House to measure up for an oven at the weekend. They currently have an electric oven in there whilst we really want dual fuel. They have no idea if there's a gas supply in there.

I don't really want to leave it to the last minute to work out whether or not we can get a dual fuel cooker because it might be too late by then. We'd also have to get someone in to fit the thing. And I doubt I'll be able to find someone to come out on a Saturday who won't cost an arm and a leg.

We have a microwave so it won't be like we can't eat. We can survive on ready meals, takeaway and, after Christmas, leftovers. However, part of our thrifty plan for presents this year was to make sweets and food for people. Can't do any of that without an oven!

Choosing an oven

One of the things we definitely do need when we move into the new house is an oven. In fact, we are disturbing the current owners to measure up for an oven and a fridge on Saturday.

Ben and I love cooking and we have been plagued with the ails of a crappy oven for the last three years. We've done all right but it's time to move up in the world. We need a double oven. To be able to grill something while roasting something else seems like a huge, unknown luxury to us.

If I could have anything I wanted I'd have an AGA S-Series 6:4. It's basically AGA's conventional cooker offering. AGAs look beautiful but for someone like me a heat storage cooker just wouldn't be practical. The 6:4 has all the good looks of an AGA with the practicality of a conventional oven. The price is barely worth thinking about. Let's just say I couldn't afford it.

This John Lewis dual fuel cooker looks sleek and modern and at £879 it'll probably perform too. It's just a bit boring though. It sounds like it would cook well. The description says you can cook sweet and savoury dishes together without flavour crossover.

We only have one shelf and one oven in our current cooker. This seems like a whole new world!

This Cannon dual fuel cooker is probably the one we will go with, providing there's the space in the kitchen. Cream would match the yellow of the wall tiles and the pale flooring but stainless steel is a bit more modern. I think stainless steel looks cheap. This one is £587 at a quick glance but I'm pretty sure we've seen it for £509.

Beautiful Modern Thing

While researching items for magazine I came across Beautiful Modern Thing and was blown away by their products and website. It's relatively new venture, all powered by the brilliant Sweetpea & Willow. Take a look at the website, they've got some lovely stuff on offer.

Here are a few of my favourites, just click on the image to go to the product page.

Le Superflu

I was scrolling through the wonderul Decor8 blog when I came across an interview with the owner of Le Superflu, a gorgeous jewellery shop in Hannover. Some of the images are truly inspirational but this really caught my eye...

What a fantastic idea! I don't intend to go to Hannover any time soon but this shop looks exquisite! To see all the images and to read the fantastic interview with Owner Doris Meier go to the Decor8 post.

I was thinking of displaying my jewellery on a fancy coat rack of some sort but this is an ingenious and free idea!

Achica - £5 off for you

Buying a house is expensive but that doesn't stop me wanting to fill it full of costly, beautiful items. As a result I am always on the look out for bargains.

Achica works much in the same way as sites like Brand Alley and Secret Sales do, two sites I've bought a fair amount off (life savers last Christmas when I was trying to be frugal).

If you sign up through this link then you will get £5 off your first order. 

I wanted to share with you some of the fantastic sales they have going on at the moment. Hopefully this will give me either some inspiration for Christmas gifts or for my new house too!

Orla Kiely Bed Linen

 I love the patterns of Orla Kiely's work. It's bright, natural and instantly recognisable. There are florals, leaves and even the fantastic Car Park print. It may say bed linen but there's also some beautiful towels on offer.

OneWorld Trading

This sale is full of furniture and items that would befit an explorer's home office. Comfy chairs, weathered wood and pieces that look like they could be carrier off into some far off land.

Culinary Concepts

This sale is full of shiny dishes, wooden goodies and items that would last you through the winter then look perfect during any garden party as soon as the weather starts warming up.