My DIY Wish-List for 2010

To be completely honest, this has been my wish-list for the past couple of years but I am determined that this will be the year that it gets done!!!!

• Re-decorate our bedroom

You may have noticed in previous pics of our messy bedroom (yep, it's still like that!) that it's very purple!  It's been like that for the past 5 years.  I love the colour purple and in my early twenties it seemed perfectly reasonable to paint the walls lilac in our bedroom.  My husband didn't really get a choice in the matter, bless him.  As the years have gone by though, we really would like a "grown up" bedroom, somewhere to escape to in the evenings and that will help up relax after a hard day's work.  I've already got the ball rolling by buying plain white, egyptian cotton bedding (to try and create that hotel-luxury feel that is constantly being mentioned in Ideal Home Mag), so now we need to take that one step further and remove the lilac from the walls!!!

• Paint the kitchen

When we got married in 2006 we decided not to have a "traditional" gift list as we'd already been living together in our own house for 3 years and had most of the homeware items that we needed.  Instead we asked for friends and family to contribute towards a new kitchen.  We were overwhelmed by the generosity and were able to order everything when we came back from our honeymoon.  We didn't spend a fortune but have been very pleased with our Homebase purchase: 

We were also very lucky to have my father-in-law to tile the floor, fit the kitchen and tile the walls for us - he's brilliant!!!  Anyway, we only had the walls left to paint in order to finish it all off and, 3 years later it still hasn't been done!!  I even bought the paint over 18 months ago in the hope that it would get done before Freya arrived - alas, this wasn't to be!!!  We have no excuse, it really needs to be done this year!

• Paint the bathroom

Similarly to our bedroom, in our early twenties we really liked the blue in our bathroom - so much so that we actually used exactly the same paint as we had in the flat that we lived in before! 

We have now out-grown this colour and would really like to try and create a more luxury-feel (I read too many Ideal Home magazines, can you tell?!!!).  Anyway, at the tail-end of last year we treated ourselves to new towels in black and white, so all we need to do is paint the walls.  I would also like to introduce a colour to keep the room from looking too cold, but haven't got as far as deciding what colour or how I'm going to do that yet!!!

• "Repair" the dining-room walls.

We decorated our dining-room just before Freya was born and we absolutely loved it as it made the room so much lighter.  We picked the wallpaper to go on one wall as a "feature" but, as the dining room links directly onto the kitchen via an archway (you can see in the kitchen picture above), we didn't want anything too patterned or bright as we wanted the rooms to "flow" (or at least not clash too much!).

You may be able to see in the lower right-hand corner of the wall that there appears to be an odd, dark patch in the wallpaper?  Well, this is the result of my dear puppies........

Yes, all of that hard work was chewed up with a side-order of door-frame!!

We have got a spare roll of the wallpaper left so, when I'm sure that the dogs are out of their chewing phase (please let it be in 2010!!!) then we will try and "repair" this part of the wall!!!

I'm sure that there are other things that will make it onto my list, but for now I'd like to leave it here - 4 "projects" in 12 months seems achievable, so I don't want to aim too high just yet!!!