Beautiful weekend

We have been again very busy this weekend. Our friends Matt & Dee had a wedding. It was such a beautiful day. Bride was pretty, dress was amazing, groom was nervous and food was delicious. Their cake was very funny.

Personalized storage boxes

We have bought some time ago 2 simple storage boxes. We have them for our toiletries. We try to buy them (toiletries) when on offer and that is why we can end up with 6 bottles of shampoo and 10 tubes of toothpaste. So we store them in the boxes on the top of the wardrobes. Boxes were quite cheap £16 for one. This is what I did with them.

Busy makes my happy

I like to be busy. Go to the GYM then straight to work then write something for my blog on my lunch break. After work straight to second work and when not having any shift that day go home and cook some nice dinner, feed the cats & play with them, hover & clean the house then maybe write something for the blog again or do some little DIY.

At the weekend it is food shopping, big cleaning, washing, ironing, gardening and of course baking.

Yep, I like to be busy. It is really funny that more busy I am more happy and also more energy I have.

Nothing is perfect

Yes, nothing is perfect and if you are really hard trying to make it than you are just stressing yourself out.
For example my car. It is very, very far from perfect but I really like it. It got scratched on the door (at the car park) and I never discovered who did it.

Spending in the restaurant

I have to say we overdid it this month with spending! We went out three times for a meal. In last year we went just a few times for special occasional but nothing like 3x in one month!

We usually cook at home and then invite our friends for a meal. This month we went out for my birthday. We got gift voucher but we still had to pay for a drinks and service (and train tickets to London) and that wasn't cheap. Then we went out twice for dinner with friends and our bills for two people were £66 and £63! It is just me or is eating out really, really expensive?

Source: Web

For love of candles

We love candles! Nice dinner on the table, glass of wine and some nice candles do a mountain of good for relaxing evening. We have several if them almost every time with our dinner. So it isn't surprise when we saw some really nice candle holders in John Lewis on sale that we have to have them.

Weekly baking - Oat & raisins cookies

This week I did very easy and quick cookies.

Re-grouting kitchen DIY

We had very busy weekend. We finally re-grouted our kitchen. When we bought our house we have known that it will need number of DIY projects. We already did most of them and re-grouting kitchen was one of the last.
We got some experience with re-grouting our bathroom and I have to say doing our kitchen was so much easier.
I think that previous owners used one of these whitening grout pens and over the time it went really bad and started to flake. It was hard to remove it but once we did it grout was under it quite healthy.
So first we cleared out our kitchen and then spent about a day removing flaking grout.

Happy cats with dog bed

We have won a little battle with our lovely cats. They sleep with us at night and sometime they will wake us up when jumping on the bed. Also they like to lay together. So we bought them big "dog" bed and put it at the foot of your bed.
They like it!

Birthday present/ Ramsay London

I had a birthday on Thursday and my lovely husband took me to 3 Michelin star restaurant Ramsay in London!
We actually got this lunch as our wedding present last year but still didn't have a time to go there.
We don't go out very often so this was real treat to us.
Our table was that in left bottom corner and of course restaurant was full. I even got a little birthday cake and candle! Manager than sing me happy birthday. So, so, nice!

I had a look in the kitchen too and there was 15 members of staff and head chef was a lady!
One of the waiters could also speak my language! What more can a girl wish to have for birthday!

Source: Web

So thank you very much my husband Rob and also Dee and Matt for this present!

Painting the fireplaces second part

Yes, I have been painting our fireplaces again. The stains on them are just showing!
I already did 3 coats and walls are still stained.
My next step was trying to paint it with bathroom paint. It is more covering than ordinary emulsion and also we already have it.

Spring cleaning - keep it thrifty

We have been very busy for a few days. Weather here in UK was very nice and warm so we did spring cleaning & washing. It is so nice not to be using our tumble drier! When it is on I can just feel money drifting away.

So we washed all of our bedding and toppers (we have 3!) and also sofa covers. They have all these marks on them about not to be dry cleaned or washed but with cats they just have to get washed. So I have risked it.
I have first washed cushion covers and they survived. I did them on wool and on very cold.

Weekly baking - Easy plum cake

This receipt is again my mums. It is very basic receipt which you can change into gluten and dairy free if you want to.
It is also very cheap and to make.

Reused wine storage box

Years ago I have bought this old wooden wine box for my vegetable home growing. Unfortunately for our fist garden we really didn't need it and also it didn't "fit there. So we have decided to "clean"it and reused it as storage at home.

 

My fitness pal

I go to the GYM. Yes, I am trying be really healthy and fit. I can actually feel my age and some exercise is helping to slow it down. It is really weird but I feel the most energy after good session and good run in the GYM. :-)

How I said before I am very lucky that my company has corporate membership. I salute all people (Especially in UK) who run outside. Weather in UK is not very good for it. It is always raining or the wind is so strong that any running is real effort.

I have this App on my phone where you can put what you had for food and what sort of exercise you did that day and it will tell you if you are eating too much or too less.

Source: Web

Healthy paprika potatoe vedges

We do these potatoes very often. They are delicious quick and healthy and if you are already using oven than they will not cost you a penny to just put them in the oven too.
They are baked but using just a minimum of virgin olive oil they are on the "healthy" side.
You can have them with number of dishes or on they own as dippy food. Also my favourite is paprika favour you can use any herbs from your cupboard. :-)

Enjoy little things in your live

This weekend was the best one in the last 5 months. Spring is finally in UK and here in Surrey was 17C and blue, blue sky!
Of course I was gardening. Planting and weeding and tidying. Always trying to make our little garden look bigger :-)
Is so nice to see our plants and flowers to grow. Even if slugs, snails and caterpillars are having buffet from my garden. I swear I never saw so many of the monsters!
So far I am winning.

Paint your own door mat

Yes, you can do it!
It started with our front door being attacked by cat. I mean some strange cat was literally peeing on our front door (once on back door too) ! I have to clean them almost every day with detol.

Unfortunately our really nice designed front door mat had enough and even with spray of disinfectant it was smelling horribly of cats wee. It had to go.
So I didn't want to buy another quite pricey door mat. We bought Wilkinson basic one.

I just didn't like how plain it was and then I got this idea. I have spray painted number of items and so far it was success so why I couldn't spray paint my door mat?
I wanted something simple but what will bring smile to our faces when coming home and simple "hello" will look nice.

Weekly baking - Three coloured parrot cake

This is very easy and more on "healthy" side cake.
It doesn't have any butter or oil only yogurt.

A little bit of statistics

I almost forgot! Yesterday it was 2 months anniversary of my blog!

I did 50 posts
I had 1064 page views
Most viewed pages are my baking pages!

I am trying not to look on statistics too much. You can get addictive to them.
Unfortunately no any followers yet. :-(
But I am doing this blog for myself and my "memory of goldfish" head :-) so I have this rule of looking on statistics only once a day :-)
And because my baking pages are the most popular I will make one more statistic today. Fist ever day with two posts.

Permission from our neighbours for painting fence

Yes, if your fence is not really yours but your neighbours you need permission. In worst scenario it could be criminal damage to paint it without it.

Our lovely little garden has this unpainted "weathered" fence around.

Is your pet sleeping with you?

Answer is: Yes.
After more than a year we have gave up (mostly because the meowing and scratching the door) and let our cats sleep in our bedroom. It wasn't without a little problems like cats being so excited about it that they started play fight right on top of us. :-) Or waking us up at 3:00 in the morning because they wanted cuddle.

Fix everything now or it will go worst

Yes, yes, we are trying fix everything as soon as it is broken but with that chimney leak we left it too long.
You know we had this little leak inside of our fireplace. We discussed it and we taught that it is because of heavy rain for past 2 months. It was just raining through chimney. But no, one morning after really bad rain plus storm we had stains on the walls of our fireplaces. Hmm, doesn't look like it is just raining into a chimney. Unfortunately too late.

Walls were stained and wallpaper was bulging.
So we called roofer and of course the chimney flashing was badly damaged (just falling of) and we were lucky that one of our chimney pots didn't fall on our heads.
So now everything fixed. It took roofer less than hour!

We were left now with damaged wallpaper and stains on two of our walls. Firstly I have "painted" it with bleach. It was in case of mould. Wet wall is very good for it. Then we left it for 3 weeks to dry. Our dehumidifier helped.
After that I have to cut small 2 - 3 mm line of the wallpaper.

Keep looking for offers :-)

Every week before doing shopping I always check the "My supermarket" for offers. Last week I found out that Tesco is selling leg of lamb for £6/kg! That is very cheap. They were selling it at the counter so we went there early on Saturday so we could chose some nice leg.

I wanted about 1.5kg so I got attention of the shop assistant and asked her for "one and a half of lamb leg". She took the smallest leg and put it on the scales  (strange) and said that she is sorry but this one is about 0.66 kg! She clearly didn't understand me (me being the foreigner)  so I repeated myself and she again that she doesn't have anything smaller than that!
It was actually quite funny. I was getting upset and she was getting upset until my "English" husband said that I wanted one and a half kilo of that lamb leg! He said it same way as me and the counter lady understood him! Ahhh, doesn't mater how long you speak the language, there will be always situation when you will be not understood! :-)  Next time I will just ask for 2 kilos :-)

In the end we got that lamb and I did it with my homegrown rosemary.  I have this big bush in the end of our garden. My husband gave it to me 2 years ago. Than it was this cute little thing.
Now it is very good investment. I didn't need to buy any rosemary for past 2 years.

  

Weekly baking - Rustic banana cake (gluten, dairy free version)

This week I had a few bananas left. They were going slowly brown so I have made a rustic banana cake to use them up.
Receipt is very easy and can be made into gluten and also dairy free version.