My Garden Overhaul: The Trex Transcend Composite Deck REVEAL!!!

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I am SO excited to finally reveal on the blog my brand new decking area, made from Trex Transcend Composite Decking and Trex Signature Railings. If you’ve been following our garden overhaul progress you will have seen why I had given up on our traditional timber deck, as well as a progress report of the build. This post is all about how the finished decking area now looks and how I have styled it so it is perfect for alfresco dinners and summer parties. So, without further delay, here are all the final photos of my finished raised decking area in my garden. As you can imagine, I am delighted with how it has turned out!

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Garden Progress Update: Replacing My Old Timber Deck With Trex Transcend Composite Decking

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Last week on the blog I talked about my big garden plans and how I had given up on our rotten, raised timber deck area of our garden. Instead, it was all going to be ripped out and replaced by something called Trex Transcend - a strong and durable composite decking made from 95% recycled materials. Well, as you can tell from the header image to this post (!!) the exciting news is that the big garden overhaul has begun! Landscape company The Greenkeeper arrived to dismantle and and re-lay the deck just over a week ago. After some initial framework problems, the actual installation of the Trex Deck was pretty interesting to watch. So, here is the build progress so far.....

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My Big Plans For The Garden Deck This Summer

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Hello and welcome to my garden! I have not featured the garden on my blog in a long time and with good reason - it is a disaster that I just cannot keep on top of. Well, not the garden itself but actually the decking area. We have a really large area of the garden that is raised decking, but the truth is the past couple of years it hasn't even been used - in fact I've actively cornered it off as I feel it is unsafe for the family.

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Sprucing Up My Outside Space With Exterior Paints By Sandtex & Sadolin

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Bank holiday weekends for me, like a lot of people, are all about DIY! The three-day period just gives that extra amount of time to complete any projects both inside and outside of the home. With the bank holiday weekend just gone having been dry, warm and sunny, I used this time to spruce up my outdoor balcony. It had been a few years since I had painted the deck boards in this space and they were looking weathered and bare. The metal railings had also peeled and cracked in the sun from summers gone-by. This summer, I wanted to bring an old wooden bench that had been left at the bottom of the garden up on the balcony as a colourful seating area, so I set about transforming the deck, railings and the bench using exterior paints by Sandtex and Sadolin.

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Kohler Celebrates Clerkenwell Design Week & Chelsea Flower Show 2018 With New Floral Sink Collection

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Sometimes there are interior and home products that I see that make me elated and go "YES! That is RIGHT UP MY STREET!!" A visit to the the Kohler Experience Centre today on my tour of Clerkenwell Design Week 2018 made me do just that. In the week where London celebrates the best of horticulture with the Chelsea Flower Show, alongside the best in architecture and design with CDW, it was the perfect time for Kohler to unveil in the UK their new collection of Dutchmaster sinks. Big, bold, dramatic florals on a dark and moody background cover the entire surface of the washbasins, with two separate designs that come as a circular or rectangular model.

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Product Review: How To Stylishly Live Sustainably With The Eco Duvet

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Lately I have really noticed a shift towards people wanting to live much more ethically within their own home. Showers and white goods that save water have been around for a good while now, while the introduction of new technology has meant that we can get much more of a grip on how much energy we are using (and money we are spending). However, things seem to be taking a bigger step towards purchasing homeware products that are re-usable, recyclable and cruelty-free. Last month at the Ideal Home Exhibition interior designer extraordinaires 2LG created a 'love/work' space that encompassed the use of vegan leather and worktops made of recycled yogurt pots. The result was impeccably sexy and stylish, a million miles away from what could be considered by some as a 'hippy-chic home'.

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Blue Hues: Bringing The Inside Out With Garden Furniture From Marks & Spencer

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I have a small balcony accessed via some arched doors from my living area that is an absolute sun trap, so in the summer months I spend more time here than in the garden. Last year I created a really kitsch miami-pink style space here, which although was fun for one summer, it did not work at all with the living space and felt completely disjointed. This year I really wanted the area to be an extension of my living room as I felt it would work better than as a completely separate area to it. I wanted the furniture to be really good quality, while also fit in with the stylish pieces I had indoors. My living room is a warm blue hue, so when I discovered that Marks & Spencer were focusing on Artisan Blues for Spring/Summer 2018, I just had to check out their Alfresco range of garden furniture and accessories.

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How To Apply Window Film With The Window Film Company

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The picture below is of the en-suite bathroom off our guest room at home. It is mainly used as the 'downstairs loo' as it is right by the kitchen in the basement. It has this lovely window that looks onto our back courtyard and then over to the kitchen window, however, this view can only be enjoyed when frequenting one of two places - either using the toilet or taking a shower! Safe to say whatever side of the window you are on, no-one is going to want to see someone else the other side of the glass

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Birds, Flowers & Butterflies: The New Spring Wallpaper Collections From Laura Ashley

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Spring is the perfect time to give the rooms in your home an overhaul, and with statement wallpaper (on all walls, not just a feature wall!) being a key trend in interiors in 2018, why not update your decor with the new wallpaper collections from Laura Ashley? I was recently asked to write a guest post over on the Laura Ashley blog all about my favourite wallpaper picks from the new Spring collection, which you can read and see all the photos in full here.

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Creating A Gold & Teal Geometric Paint Effect In A Hallway

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A big mistake that people make with hallways is they think they have to keep them plain and neutral in colour. The fear is that an often narrow space will feel even narrower and enclosed if it is painted anything other than white. The truth is having a hallway in a deep colour will actually make the rooms coming off the hall feel much larger and brighter as you walk into them.

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Creating A Gallery Wall In My Hallway With Desenio Art Prints

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The hallway area at the top of my house, which leads to the bedrooms and the family bathroom, has recently looked pretty lackluster. I had a number of random pictures in thick clunky frames hung in no particular order, and the whole space just did not feel cohesive or make me feel particularly happy as I walked up the stairs. So when Scandinavian art, poster and print company Desenio got in touch and asked if I fancied some new art prints on them, I jumped at the chance of curating my own personal, pretty gallery wall on my stairwell.

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Great Design For A Great Price: Focusing On Debenhams Lighting

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I've recently found in my interior-design work that I am always including some sort of lighting from high street retailer Debenhams in the design scheme. Clients come to me for help getting great interiors on a budget, and Debenhams have recently been my go-to brand to get incredible lighting that would not look out of place stocked in Heals or The Conran Shop.

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Updating The Kitchen: Looking Towards Kitchen Trends With Howdens

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Our oven decided to stop working two days before Christmas. Including us, there were 8 people to cook for on Christmas Day. We ended up making roast potatoes in a frying pan and relied on a lot of boiled vegetables to get us through the meal. Feverishly attempting to purchase a new oven in the Boxing Day sales we found the age-old range installed by the previous owners was a tiny 76cm wide, with the modern standard width being 90cm. The only thing to do was to cut down the existing cabinets and shave back the worktop to make room for a larger cooker. This has now all been done and we have a lovely shiny new oven, but I'm left with half my kitchen units unpainted, plus a missing splashback (they had to remove the tiles to fit the new cooker). I now need to give my kitchen a mini-refresh, and as we are at the start of the year I've been looking towards predictions for kitchen trends in 2018 to give me a bit of kitchen design inspiration.

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How to DIY a Rainbow Mural

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The 12th - 18th March 2018 is National Home Improvement Week -  a week to inspire, celebrate and enable people to improve their own homes. So when DIY & Home Improvement online marketplace Mano Mano asked me to share a great DIY that people could easily copy, I instantly thought of the nursery project that I had recently carried out for one of my clients.

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Product Review: Leisure Chefmaster Dual Fuel Range Cooker from AO.com

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Our old range cooker was inherited from the previous owners of the house when we moved in three years ago. To be honest, it was always on its way out - one hob never worked and over time it took so long to cook anything I probably could have gone outside and rubbed two sticks together to create fire to boil a pan of water quicker than the time it took to cook a pizza to a decent standard in that oven. So when it finally packed up completely two days before Christmas (we ended up making roast potatoes in a frying pan for Christmas dinner) it was time to start 2018 with a brand new cooker.

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The Best Budget Buy Floor Lamps

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If you are redecorating or doing up a new home, one area where you can really save your money rather than blow the budget is on the lighting. There are some incredible lighting pieces out there that look designer, but have a very pocket-friendly high street price tag. Since this blog is all about getting a designer look for less, I couldn't resist sharing my recent list of top budget floor lamp finds.

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What Shutter Style Is Best For Your Windows?

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If you follow me on Instagram you'll see that I've recently painted a very large rainbow mural in a nursery for a client of mine. While searching the internet for a window treatment to match the rainbow wall, I came across this image below by the shutter company Shutterly Fabulous. Isn't it brilliant?? I love how each different colour louvre creates a rainbow effect down the shutter. On a side note, shutters are also really great for a child's room as there are no hanging cords or reams of fabric for them to get themselves dangerously caught up in.

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