Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Spring greens

I don't know about where you are but the weather is distinctly gloomy in my neck of the woods at the moment and has been for days. It's wet and cold and the sky looks like it's fallen in. Not exactly Spring-like!


Still, the bulbs are well on their way up in the garden, although not as far on as these that Mr TVL kindly bought for me when he popped out for a pint of milk.


They are currently cheering up my kitchen and hallway. We recently found ourselves re-decorating the hallway after replacing our sofa and chair. The old sofa was so big we had trouble getting it out of the living room and ended up scraping the wallpaper and catching the woodwork in several places while trying to manoeuvre it through the doorway and down the hall.  My intention was certainly not to re-do the whole lot but the yellow and terracotta colour scheme was looking tired and a bit dingy so although I was forced in to it I'm kind of glad really as it did need freshening up.

 
The hallway is one 'room' I've always struggled a bit with. It's a very narrow L-shape, typical of a bungalow of this era and with very little natural light. We had new doors hung when we moved in (yes, the Sapele ones had to go!) and we had half glazed ones where we could (not a good idea for the bathroom obviously...) but still, most of the time it's gloomy. Hence, the yellow although I don't think it really helped much.
So this time I was going to paint the whole lot white but when it came to buying the paint I chickened out! Although I love the idea of all white walls I find them a bit scary at the same time.
So I compromised with Antique White on the Anaglypta and a soft green I mixed myself above the dado.

All 37 inches of it!

While I was at it, I took the opportunity to *cough* tone down the 'stuff' and have only put back...wait for it...ONE mirror and TWO pictures!
 
 
I used to have this Barbola mirror in the bedroom (along with about three others...) until IT was purged a while ago too. It's too pretty to be stuck up in the loft and I thought the pinky-red roses would look lovely against the green. I have to admit, I'm moving slightly away from the florals; they won't disappear altogether but I'm trying to mix some other things in there now.
 
 
I'm still undecided about whether to keep the Anglepoise lamp here or swap it for something with a fabric shade. I'm also framing a picture that I may replace the large floral print with on the opposite wall and it's NOT flowers. Quelle horreur!! But otherwise job done. And to say I had no intention of doing it I'm actually quite pleased with how it turned out. Now, I really have to turn my attentions to the bathroom...
As I was doing this post I realised I should have shown a 'before' pic but oddly I could only find one on my computer which I'm sure can't be right but here it is anyway. Lots of cottage prints, family portraits and other assorted pictures on every portion of wall space!



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In other news! If you've recently visited the website you may have noticed we've had a bit of a facelift. That's all I'm going to say about that. Moving on...

February marked the sixth anniversary?/birthday? of This Vintage Life. How time does fly. That's quite a long time and having given a lot of thought generally to things over the winter I've decided that there will be no more big uploads of stock, at least for the forseeable future anyway. I'll be adding one or two items weekly or as and when I acquire something interesting.

Therefore I won't be sending out New Stock emails to the mailing list anymore. I think you'd soon get fed up if I dropped you an email whenever I added one item to the site! So, I'm going to add an update to Facebook every time there's a new product added as it's quicker and simpler that way.

 I'll try and mention it on the blog too although that may just be a link in the sidebar. I might add something to the home page of the website too so if you drop in regularly, you should know that way. So please, if you want to be kept updated about stock you'll need to visit us on Facebook and 'like' us or whatever it is you have to do to get updates (I'm so un-techie!!)