Pretty. Crafty. Home.

(He heee, I can hear the sniggers from those in the know..., and the raised eyebrows! :-)

'Cause those terms don't really describe me and my khaya.

 "Pretty" conjures images of pink, pastels, splashes of red, flowers, Cath Kidston, Greengate etc,  - which I do love, but being Gemini, and having 1 husband, 2 boys and 2 Boxers, we tend to be ...untidy, cluttered, lots of retro, but a bit more masculine, lots of shabby (but real, not created), and lots of dust (thanks to the empty servitude erf next door, serving as access route to the nursery school.

And with my husband being a hunter, there's also the odd zebra and kudu skin on the cement floors (which make us healthy, organic, low-fat venison eaters!).

(still unpacking and moving into the room here)

But there's always space for improvement, and this what is going to happen.

Six years ago we bought a tiny, tiny, square little matchbox house, built for railway workers in around 1933 (oldish for South Africa). It was a pretty little thing, with (neglected) wooden floors, lovely pressed steel ceilings, absolutely no wardrobes of any kind, 2 sinc cupboards in the kitchen.

But sitting on a 1300 square m erf. Thus lots of space for kids and dogs. A huge sandpit. Jungle gym and trampoline.  And located in a old, worker class suburb with relatively little crime (very NB in South Africa).

So since then we have almost doubled the size by adding a huge kitchen/living room, changing the old kitchen to a bedroom, the sitting room to a home office, the back stoep to a bathroom, adding a guest toilet, doubled the garage and tamed the bushveld to create a simple, yet huge garden.

Our taste in decor is very specific.  The addition has tinted cement floors, we have almost no tiles anywhere, we eat at an old desk from a police office, I store my kitchen stuff in a old police filing cupboard and shop counter. The guest toilet is also a library. Most of our furniture comes from Bellbottoms, the greatest vintage shop ever, and me and the owner joke that  our house could serve as a showroom for his shop!

The boys have just moved out of a small room-between-two-rooms, and This, dear friends, is going to be My Room:

(Current state a bit messy!)

The floors will be sanded, the walls repainted, I'm thinking a new Design Team fabric blind for the window and...a Permanent Spot for my 19 yr old little used sewing machine.  On the little green table that I got just yesterday, for this spot.

Watch this space.   From this room, many things will sewed and planned.  I started moving my yarn into the (horrible) wardrobes that we are going to retain, and look how I'm using my Ikea Hanging storage again, after six years!

(Sports equipment and scrap to be moved  Somewhere Else).

So excuse me please. I'm quickly finishing a pillow for Leandra, and then I'll search high and low through the house for all my bits and pieces which can now come live in My Room.

Where I'll be crafting and sewing and being extremely productive.

Prettifying the home.

(Thanks to Sandra at Cherry Heart for this nudge in the right direction, and also hosting Pretty Crafty Home!)

(And sorry if I don't get to the Flickr group too much - fighting for  time on email, Blogger and my two groups on Facebook as it is!)