Cassiefairy's lifestyle blog

Welcome to Cassiefairy's little lifestyle blog ~ pull up a chair & put the kettle on…

Tag Archives: furniture


by Leave a comment

Top tips for spring cleaning

In our part of the world winter tends to get too long and depressing. We can’t wait for spring to come, sun to shine and butterflies to start fluttering in our belly. Spring brings out the best in us, inspires us to dress up and to feel pretty. There’s another kind of “dressing up” we like to do when the gloomy winter days are over; spring cleaning – sounds familiar? Maybe not all of us really like it, but we definitely need to freshen up our home in the spring and start enjoying its sunnier version.

Tips and tricks on making spring cleaning fun

Now, why not have fun while de-cluttering, reorganizing and reviving your home? There are ways to make this activity truly entertaining but you’ll need to clean the house first. In order to get to the more cheerful activities faster, you can rope in your family members to help with cleaning, mopping, dusting, vacuuming, window-washing, etc.

spring cleaningImage

Reorganization and redecoration

1. What’s most obvious about spring are the vibrant colours. The flowers are in bloom, the sun is waking you up with its almost unbearably happy shine. Spring is a good time to refresh your walls and if you want to make a change, think about painting your walls yellow, light blue or vibrant green. Adding new colours might improve the look of your existing furniture and soft furnishings or you could easily makeover an old unit with a fresh coat of paint.

2. Treat yourself to one new piece of storage furniture such as a TV unit, electronic device or kitchen appliance. Something new can improve the overall appearance of your existing items, and you can set about recycling and repurposing the rest of your stuff.

3. Renovating old furniture doesn’t have to be about getting a perfect finish – you cane make a ‘shabby chic’ effect by painting old chairs and tables using several layers of spray paint, sanding the last layer off so that the previous (white) layer is visible. You can find tutorials on the Cassiefairy.com blog on how to do this and create a piece of furniture with a vintage look to it.

4. Get your whole family involved and organize a day of art with your kids/partner/friends, painting vases and photo frames to compliment your new decor.

spring flowersImage

5. Open up your home with new plants and flowers in your living room – here’s a blog post about how house plants can clean the air in your home. You don’t have to make a jungle out of your home, but the right amount of plants can make your home look fresh and elegant.

6. You might want to consider removing heavy curtains so that your home gets more light. You can also remove rugs (until next winter), because it will be easier to clean the floors and you’ll get a sense of living in a bigger space.

You don’t really need to spend any money on dressing up your home for Spring. It’s just important to come up with new ideas and to have the will to work on creating something pretty.  It’s amazing how little details can change the appearance of your home. Simply moving your furniture around can change the way your room looks. Putting up interesting photo frames and painting your walls an usual colour can be enough to visually improve your house.  Focus on details: pillows on sofas, small sculptures, lamps, flowers, wall stickers and posters, etc. Once you are done with this demanding job, you can sit back and enjoy your home’s new spring beauty.

Guest post by blogger Eva Stephen, author of fantastic interior decor articles for House to Home, DIY by Design and Mad About Pink.

About these ads


by 4 Comments

DIY Furniture Project – Blanket Cupboard

Happy Saturday! I hope you are having a great weekend, we had some more snow here yesterday so its chilly again – it’s supposed to have been the coldest night of the year here so we wrapped up warm with lots of extra blankets and duvets and were nice and toasty!

blue blanket cabinet makeover diy furniture project paint wallapaper floral cassiefairy

I thought that today I would share with you a quick Do-It-Yourself project that I’ve done, making over an old storage unit into my funky vintage blanket cupboard. This cabinet was on its way to the household waste recycling centre when I took a second look at it and realised that, although the varnish was peeling and there were scratches and marks all over the unit, it was a perfectly sturdy piece of furniture and could be re-vamped into something much more pretty with very little effort.

blanket cabinet blue painted furniture makeover diy project

My hubby and I gave the whole unit a light sanding over, taking off any loose bits of varnish as we went, and then wiped down the cupboard inside and out. I then painted the whole unit with two coats of paint to refresh it. I chose blue wood paint because we had a spare pot in the shed but this kind of unit could be painted in any shade to coordinate or contrast with the decor of the room that it will be living in. After the paint had dried, we cut a piece of blue floral wallpaper to the size of the shelves and pasted it on with normal wallpaper paste and left it to dry. Again, we had some left over paper from our decorating, but you could even use a sample piece from the DIY store, depending on the size of your shelves, or buy an end-of-line discounted roll for only a couple of quid. If you fancy lining your drawers, you could also use the same wallpaper for this too!

blue cabinet makeover project painted furniture diy blog post

This now provides valuable extra storage space for all those blankets that only come out in the winter or when guests come to stay, and it would even be good in a child’s nursery with all the space for toys below and clothes in the drawers above. I hope that you’ll be able to see some potential any worn-out furniture you come across, and have a go at your own renovation project! Check out some of my other DIY upcycling projects below :D

Related articles


by 4 Comments

Interior design inspirations for a retro home: Office space

I’ve been working on a ‘makeover’ for my living room since moving in back in May (yes, I know… I’d never succeed on 60-Minute-Makeover!) and I’ve chosen a fairly garish 60s & 70s retro theme in orange, teak and brown with a few accents of blue. Although it’s taken me a while to get to this point that’s mostly due to lack of funds and the need for rummaging through car-boot sales, second-hand shops, auctions and even giving a new home to furniture that would otherwise be thrown away at the side of the road. I’ve buffed up a few pieces and I’m pleased to say that I’m nearly there! The only thing that needs attention is my work-space so I needed to do a bit of research into retro office spaces and here’s some of the photos that I’ve been inspired by from John Lewis, Retro Office and Apartment Therapy.

So I’m taking inspiration from these office spaces and will be keeping an eye out for a suitably retro office chair over the next couple of weeks. Let me know if you come across anything that might be suitable!

Related articles
finn Juhl chest of drawers 1965 chair


by 13 Comments

Interior Design Inspirations – Finn Juhl

As many of you know, I have been researching design ideas for my living room and have already started collecting together furniture, art and soft furnishings for my new room. Here’s a reminder of my original mood board:

In my research travels I have recently come across Danish architect and designer Finn Juhl - one of the leading designers in the creation of “Danish design” in the 1940s. Oddly enough there was a decline in interest in Juhl’s designs in the 60s and 70s – I would have assumed that this would have been the period that he was most prolific in, judging by the ‘futuristic’ shapes in his furniture. Evidently, I’ve been looking to the wrong eras for inspiration -  I’ve enjoyed looking at Juhl’s designs and realised that I actually prefer his 40s & 50s furniture. One of Finn Juhl’s famous quotes is “One cannot create happiness with beautiful objects, but one can spoil quite a lot of happiness with bad ones” and I completely agree – and cannot understand why people would fill their homes with things that they don’t absolutely love. I can honestly say that I would be pretty upset to lose any of my pieces of furniture because they are not just storage, they are important to me. In fact, I’ve had the conversation ‘what would you save if your house was on fire’ with my friends recently and as my list of essential ‘saves’ grew, I realised I’d need a moving-van to get everything out that I’d want to keep. I think it’s because I have spent much time sourcing my furniture and, as many of them have been thrifted or found, I have added personal value to them by cleaning, sanding and renovating them.

If I were lucky enough to one day own a piece of Finn Juhl furniture I think it’d have to be something like these, and I’m pretty sure they’d make the list of things to save!

What do you think? What would you save from your home?

Related articles
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,334 other followers