Home by Athens.

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WE'VE DONE IT!

We got there! The little 3-bed-semi-in-Bicester is ours ♥

This week has been a complete roller coaster of all emotions, from happiness and excitement to grief and irritability and tomorrow I have to put my 'big girl' pants on all over again and head off to Athens for my first ever 'business trip'. Isn't that exciting?

I'm not even really sure where my mind is right now, but I'm sure this evening will a combination of packing for Athens, packing for moving and trying to fit in cooking dinner and drinking a glass of wine (or two).

Our front room currently looks a little like part of a hoarder's house and I'm sure I'm going to need the longest nap once this whole ordeal is over.

Currently, I'm taking advice from the infographic below but slowly beginning to accept that I'll probably have to face a little more decluttering than I wanted to in my future temporary wardrobeless life. I can't wait for IKEA.


[Boxes2Move/Bring Digital]

Garden Art.

A couple of months ago, on a quick trip over the Marlborough, curiosity finally got the better of me.

Every time we drive that way we pass the incredibly intriguing, Garden Art, and after saying we'll pop in and never actually doing it, I span the car right round the roundabout and back into their carpark.





Furnishing and decorating is very much at the forefront of my mind at the moment and I must say that the garden in our soon-to-be new home is probably one of the areas I like the least. It's just so uninspiring, with no flowerbeds or trees and just a washing line and very poorly looked after shed, it will take a little while before it's going to be somewhere I'm going to like spending time in - with that said, I wouldn't call our current garden perfect either.

So, Garden Art looked like a good place to get a few ideas for sprucing up the future garden - it turned out that their collection mainly consists of forlorn stone dogs, huge water features and anything and everything you'd expect in the grounds of a stately home — not quite what I was looking for for our small suburban space. It did make for a neat place to take photographs though, the first photos I'd taken with my SLR since Christmas.




Why yes, that is a train carriage, it had been transformed into a cute office, complete with border terriers and wood-burning stove.

Packing Up: Useful Storage

Moving day is getting closer, so that means that all storage is useful storage, whether it's cardboard, or something a little more fancy.


When I was sent this cute storage bag from Room to Grow it couldn't have come at a better time. I'm always on the hunt for receptacles to put things in but due to being semi-mid-move it was a bit hard to place this at the exact moment that I wanted to get the photos ready.



Room to Grow predominantly caters for pretty bespoke children's bedrooms so I have a pretty strong feeling that this is designed for toys or other child-related miscellanea. As a little person is nowhere near on my horizons yet, I can afford to be a little selfish and I reckon this is going to come in really useful for things like bed linen, towels and maybe extra cushions (which I've some how accumulated).




The bag itself is fairly sturdy and even though you do need to have something in it in order to hold it up, that's makes it pretty good for storing away when it's not needed - ideal for someone who's trying to cut down on clutter.

One Bank Holiday.

Oh how I'm loving this warm weather right now, I'm really enjoying getting my lunchtime hit of vitamin D and jacketless walks back to the car in the evenings.

Easter weekend passed me by in a drizzly, car-hopping blur, a fun, drizzly car-hopping blur. I was a little sad at how much sun we were promised but it's two weekends ago now so I think I can let it go.

We started on Good Friday with a trip to our friends Richard and Fran's fancy new digs in Gloucester. Our house-hunting trips this year meant I'd kind of seen this house before but Fran has filled it with lovely things and even though their plan is to move into a place all of their own soon, they've done such a great job to make it feel like home already. I was pretty good inspiration for our soon-to-be-home (I'm currently constantly mentally adjusting my Ikea shopping list).




It was our first time in Gloucester but I'm looking forward to going back in sunnier weather. We were lucky enough to be treated to Gloucester's Spring Fest and the best (not-pictured-too-soon-devoured) hog-roast bap. Lots of cute stalls from independent retailers filled the dockyard, just our kind of thing, and it sounds like a similar, smaller scale version happens fortnightly, which just sounds like a treat.








After an evening of drinks and board games and a morning of good breakfasts and the muddiest walk, we hopped in the car and back home to sort out my Easter pavlova before heading to my Gran's for a family gettogether.







Thank goodness boot-season is coming to an end...!






And I guess family-time was how the rest of the weekend continued, even if Sunday afternoon and Monday morning mainly meant going all out helping my mum sort out her garden. There were actually technically still Easter eggs in our house until yesterday so this post isn't as late as it seems - also note the remarkable restraint(!)