Small Home Projects: Frames & Bygel

April seems to have flown by and I barely ended up posting on here - determined to get more scheduled posts up at the weekends as my evenings are getting filled up more so than ever at the moment. I've done a couple of house projects this month as now we've been here a year there was a few little things I wanted to do for more storage and also just to make it more our own. We do rent so my little projects will result in a small amount of polyfiller being bought when we move out but we don't intend on moving any time soon so all is well.

The first one was buying some Bygel rails and hooks from Ikea for my dressing area. This range is silly cheap the large rails were only £2 and the little baskets just £1.50 whilst a pack of 10 hooks is only £1. The whole lot came to £14.50 and it has changed my storage in my spare room. It means accessing skin care and products I use every morning is so much easier and makes getting ready a lot quicker. It also means I can put different products in the basket so I get more use out of different things I own rather than just the same old bits.

The second thing I did was finally put up all of my frames and fill them with pictures. I've been collecting them from different stores for ages but just hadn't gotten around to putting them up. What I love about this is that I can add more to make it a bit more of a feature. I printed out over 60 photo's so it was super hard to choose which ones to put up I now have so many more that I want on my walls - might do something similar in our hallway. The frames I have are from B&Q, The Range and John Lewis. I picked up my photo's from photobox who have an offer on 50 free prints for all new accounts.

Home Obsessions: Vintage Jars

I've had my eye on this vintage look glass jar for ages - it came in at only £8 from B&Q  and looks so pretty on my dresser full of cotton wall pads. It's also meant that one of my ikea drawers is now free for my ever growing hair product collection. 

I can't stop buying pretty glass jars at the moment they're so handy for storage and just an extra bit of glamour on a dressing table or shelf.  These are my favorites at the moment.  

Glass Jar £6.99 H&M --- Glass Vase £6.99 H&M --- Vintage Collection Coloured Glass Vase £9.09 Dunelm Mill --- Korken Jar £0.80 Ikea --- White Lace Vase £11.99 The Range --- Glass Tealight Holder £1.50 H&M

DIY Pastel Bedside Lamps

Myself and Blig moved into our house nearly 8 months ago and my bedside lamps have always bugged me. We picked them up for just £5 each from B&Q mostly because they were £5 we'd just bought a lot of furniture so cheap and cheerful and worked was all we needed. However my dream of white distressed furniture, duck egg blue accents, and pretty pastels doesn't really fit with my dark brown bedside lamps. They work perfectly well and I quite like the shape of them so I didn't want to replace them just spruce them up a little bit so I transformed them and here's how: 

• I sanded them down with some fine sanding paper - just to get rid of the gloss on the lamps not all of the colour. It gave me a good base to paint standard matt emulsion on. 
• I painted the bases with 3 coats of an old tester pot I had made up an almost white shade of lilac the closest match I can resemble it too is this Dulux tester in violet white. 
• Finally I popped on these cute pastel lamp shades also just £5 from B&Q here in Green and here in Purple. 

I absolutely love them now just a little DIY has completely transformed them into lamps that actually go with my bedroom. They sit perfectly happy on top of my Ikea Aspelund bed side tables which strangely is now called the Brusali range. If you don't fancy the DIY bit involved this apple green lamp is now reduced to just £4 and a little similar. 

I'm loving these little projects at the moment. It's hard to make a rented house feel like home sometimes - especially so when you live with a boy who has fishing rods, weights and golf clubs filling up any spare space there is so these little touches are making all the difference. 

Disclosure: I do work for B&Q's website DIY.com but this post is in no way affiliated or promoted by them. I picked out all of the products and purchased them myself.