And now for a big lie down...

Apart from the splash-back (which is still the wrong colour, but I'm hoping that by the end of next week it will have been replaced with something more creamy-coloured), the kitchen is finally finished and I have so enjoyed being able to get out all my treasured things and choose a home for them knowing that they have reached their final resting place...I so dislike feelings of temporariness and transience. Above is a favourite teacup.

I have had requests for before-and-after pictures (before are the small ones on the left, after larger and in the centre)...and actually it has been rather fun looking at them for me, as it makes me to realise that we have done quite a lot over the last year...sometimes it has felt like swimming through mud, there was just so much to do in every room (what you see here is only the tip of a luridly vinyl wallpapered & aertexed covered iceberg). The before pictures were taken only two days after we'd first moved in, so it's all quite a happy mess. So, eyes left for the green and blue kitchen, complete with wooden cupboards impregnated with a special brand of grease completely immovable even by sanding...now eyes down for what I accept could be viewed by some as being a little dull and unadventurous...but to me, well, I can never tire of looking at all things cream-coloured.

The breakfast bar is finally in and thank goodness it doesn't too closely resemble the iceberg that we'd thought it might!

How pleased I am to have an oven that works and a sink that isn't brown....yes, I know the splash-back below doesn't look too horrific...but it's so far away from what we ordered...and bluey-white doesn't really cut it for something of a cream-obsessive.

After much indecision over features and specificiations, the oven ended up being chosen soley on the basis of it being endowed with this digital analogue clock that we had fallen in love with...thank goodness we have subsequently found that it also seems to be capable of cooking food!


And here's the utility room....we replaced everything but the floor...suddenly the idea of trying to hack that up (because it would have been us that ended up doing it...because wherever we can do something ourselves, we have done) seemed just too exhausting and expensive.

The kitchen and dining room are one big room...so here's the other side, home of more green and blue. I'm so pleased it's all gone now, but what living in it for over a year, with brighter colours and grubbier carpets than I thought I could cope with, has made me realise, is that this house has felt like a home to me from day one, whether the walls are green or cream...so actually it finally being the way we'd envisaged it looking is a nice cherry on top of a cake that was far more edible than we'd suspected on first viewing.

Ian and I are rather united in our desire to paint the world cream, even if our children aren't joining us on that (harrumphs of disappointment have accompanied every tin of paint that has been prised open). However, these doors that lead from the dining room into the playroom were a sticking point - Ian was determined that they should be left wood coloured...at one point they were even taken off all together and spent a week in the garage so that we wouldn't have to think about them at all. The picture below speaks for itself - I got my way!

There's just one thing that's troubling me...years ago Ian came home one night to find that I had ordered our books by colour. He's one of the most relaxed people I've ever met...but something about me doing this made him, for want of a better expression, as mad as a lorry, and an hour later I was frantically trying to de-colourise our book collection...but no matter how hard we tried to randomise them, for the duration of the time that we lived in that flat people would walk in and say: 'have you colour-coded your bookshelves?' in a slightly scandalised tone. I can feel the desire to colour-code burning inside of me again after being reminded of it here and here...but in doing so I would face the wrath of Ian and the possibility that to de-colour-code we would be forced to move house...I'm just not sure I can face that, so I must accept that the books will continue to taunt me with their technicolour disarray and that harmony will only reign in this area with the banging in of the estate agent's board...but I do hope that's not for a very, very long time, so long may the jumble continue.