design Archives - Page 2 of 2 - ET Speaks From Home

Moving Home with Children

Moving house can mean turmoil for every member of the family. The decision to move house is made largely by the adults, who then tend to focus on the practical aspects of it. The situation can be more stressful if there are children in the family, especially very small children. For them, it is a matter of a leaving their world behind.

So, what must one do in order to make the transition as smooth and as close to natural as possible for the entire family?

Pac Man and the Teething Pumpkin

Family Investments has asked ten bloggers to help their children to carve their best Halloween masterpiece. I was fortunately selected to take part in this blogger challenge to win a family day out.

Mr K is a very creative boy and I had asked him what would he like me to carve. So I let him design his pumpkin using a permanent maker. This is his crazy teething pumpkin which I used the pumpkin seeds as his teeth. As for the ears, I used the leftover pumpkin skin with toothpick to poke it into the pumpkin itself.

My Munchkin Pink Bento Set

One more week to go before my children go back to school! Have you started thinking about what to pack for their lunch box? Do you find that you always run out of ideas?

Five tips of creating more light into our house

Have you thought of how to make use of your existing furniture or perhaps getting a new glass door fitted to get more sunlight into your house? It is always difficult if your house is not facing the right direction of the sun!

Buying the right house is not easy and there are often compromises, especially around the aspect of the property but you could swap around your furniture, get better lighting or change to a glass door to get more lighting in.

We bought our new build house 5 years ago off plan. It sounds a little crazy but yes, we had bought it blindly. Our living room rarely gets bright light shine into the room. So we bought a beautiful flower floor lamp to go with our room. The floor lamp was placed in the darkest corner of the room and we use it on those typical dull rainy days to illuminate that part of the room.

The dining room is also another dark room. It used to be get a lot more light but this is the room that backed out to the garden and we’ve since had a conservatory built so the dining room gets a lot less light now. So hopefully, we can replace our existing door to bi-folding doors to allow more light into the room. Besides light, having bi-folding doors also creates more open living space and will make the room more accessible and appear larger.

How does your garden grow?

Recently, I met +Annie Spratt at the Tots100 Blog Summit and found her amazing blog. I am an amateur gardener but I am very keen to learn and keep my garden in good shape. I am linking this post up with How does your garden grow? over at Mammasaurus.

Our Next DIY Project to Transform Our House

Once you move into a new place, it is quite common to spend some time renovating the place. Then complacency sets in and before you know it you’re five years down the line and suddenly everything looks like they could do with a revamp. This happened to us recently.

As part of another project, we recently renovated our old nursery room and downstairs toilet and now every other part of our house looks like it could do with a revamp.

B&Q unloved rooms revamp with mumsnet

Recently, Mumsnet was looking for 20 MNers to revamp an unloved room in their home. I was one of the lucky ones to have been chosen by B&Q. I was sent a B&Q gift card to spend on a makeover for the unloved room.

The unloved room used to be the nursery room for our children when they were babies. They have long since moved into their own rooms and it has gradually been a dumping ground for toys and books. I wanted to use this fantastic opportunity to turn it into a study room for my children who is in primary school.

Mr K’s Lego Duplo Creation on Mother’s Day

I would just like to share some of the Lego Duplo creations my son built. He is very creative and we love how Lego can provide an outlet for his creativity.

This is a car.

Christmas Card Competition

“This blog post is my entry for the Moneysupermarket Christmas Card Competition.”

Child Categories

Scallop Shell Painting

Last week, my sister flew in from Singapore to visit and stay with us. During her stay, she wanted to cook us her special Chinese homecooked meal. She went to our local supermarket and bought a lot of fresh scallops with shells.

Kids Cotton Drawstring Bag by Star Bright Designs UK

I was very lucky to be sent two StarBright Designs’ Kids Cotton Drawstring Bags (In red with Spaceman Star and in pink with Allsorts Sweets Star) to review. I gave the pink drawstring bag to another close friend of mine to get a second opinion review.

Fruit Peacock & Hedgehog

Today, we made a play video to enter a competition by Make Time To Play.

The rules are simple, we need to submit a play video to Make Time 2 Play to inspire other families with a good play idea. They will then put the videos out to public vote and announce the winner during Play Fest on Thursday 6th September 2012 at 9.50pm.