More antiquey goodness

I've been slightly blog lazy over the past few weeks. It's been Matt's 30th birthday and last weekend I was on a hen do in Birmingham and this weekend it's Matt's turn - he's with the stag, also in Birmingham, so we've been jolly busy! While it is nice to have a little bit of time to myself (I rented the most recent Star Trek film last night. Matt isn't interested so I got to indulge and it was BRILLIANT!), I'm also not very good at it. It's my natural tendency for talking - I always end up talking to myself by the end of the weekend if he's been away! But this weekend I was lucky - it just happened to fall on a Detling antique fair weekend so my mum and Nick came over to keep me company for some antique shopping.

The weather was pretty miserable yesterday (although not quite as bad as today - we have some very soggy chickens outside!) so there were much fewer stall holders than normal but I still managed to pick up a few odds and ends.

This wooden drying rack, needed badly at this time of the year, was a bargain at £5:



I also managed to find some iron brackets for £5. These are normally £20 minimum and I've seen them as much as £75! Shown here with a kilner jar which I got for £2.



We sold a load of stuff on ebay last week and raised £150 towards re-doing the kitchen. The plan is to rip off the wall cupboards and replace them with shelves of scaffold boards on iron brackets. We did one shelf ages ago (see it here) and it looks brilliant so I've very excited about getting more done.

I also wanted to share a couple of things which joined our household recently. Firstly, this lovely chair was a find by my mum which she stripped down from a hideous black and white colour (here). Once it was done she decided that it would look more in-keeping in our house than hers and I have to say i didn't argue, it looks lovely! Shown here with a blanket that she made and a cushion from Ikea:



I also got given these absolutely beautiful Orla Kiely mugs from Simrat, who I used to work with, when I left my last job. I missed my last day because of the snow so only got to see her in January and these were such a lovely surprise - she knows me so well!



Finally, these flowers just caught my eye as I walked through the dining room just now. We got them from Sainsbury's a couple of weeks ago, which we do try to avoid as much as possible, but there were grown in Holland rather than Kenya so it alleviated my eco-guilt ever so slightly and they do make the room look lovely:



As I said, it was Matt's big-30 a couple of weeks ago so I obviously needed to pull something good out of the bag present-wise. We don't really do tangible birthday presents, but try to find a good "experience" instead. So, after much deliberation and google-based research I came up with this: We will be getting the train to Redditch, from where we will pick up our very own Moggy for the week:



Then we'll spend a couple of days traversing the A-roads of the Cotswolds, picnic basket in tow, hopefully with the top down (we're going in June). We're staying in this B&B, which really appealed to me because they have chickens and pigs. I think Matt is really pleased and I have to say I am unbelievably excited! Roll on June!