Our recycled home Archives - Lulastic and the Hippyshake

Goodbye little home!

24 July, 2013

We are outies! Vamos! We made like Tom and crui- YEAH, you get it, I know.

We have officially left our little Camberwell home. Firstly, a little bit more south to stay with my folks while we get the Campervan all ship-shape. Then to Camp Bestival and then straight over the seas to begin our European bombaround.

It’s not farewell to our friends and family, as we will still be seeing them over the next 6 months. But it is Adios to our little recycled home here in Camberwell. Here are some of my favourite snaps of the space we worked so hard to create.

HAHAHA Sorry, enormous photo frenzy. I couldn’t choose my favourites. Hope you enjoyed them.

Goodbye, little home.

PS What a bummer it’d be if you missed a post of mine, eh? Follow through Facebook or Bloglovin or even just enter your email to get them pinged into your inbox. I won’t be spamalot, promise!

PPS Photos mostly by the clever Jenny Hardy.

Our recycled home

Recycled home- Big Bedroom Makeover

22 July, 2013

Ah, this great big room! It is so beautiful! Well, the 30% of the time that there aren’t piles of clothes and junk we are hiding from visitors all over the floor, it is so beautiful!

When doing this bedroom makeover I wanted to keep it pretty simple and calm, to create a peaceful sleeping environment. It is peaceful, the 30% of the time we are asleep in there, the times we are not diving in and out of the curtains playing hide and seek or raccously bouncing on the bed. (I say “we” out of solidarity for one of my kids.)

Come on in…

Some of my favourite creations are in this room. This art I did in an old window frame for Tim’s birthday of a native New Zealand bird, the Tui.

And this suitcase shelf

and book- shelf.

There is a huge framed print we hung after finding it in Oxfam.

Both the curtains and the bed came from a house clearance. It is our family bed and we love its gargantuan size to fit us all in. We got the headboard from Gumtree, it is equally huge and Tim had to wrangle it home on THREE different buses. The things we do for a bargain, eh? I flung some vintage fabric over it and made some bunting by painting letters onto the pages of an old book.

We found all these cupboards and drawers in one junk shop after months of searching for the perfect ones to fit in those spaces. We were SO stoked with them all!

We are leaving all of this furniture for the people moving into our home. I’m going to miss it badly, especially our giant bed.

I wanted to squeeze this post in before we move out, so I can look back and nostalgically reflect on how we transformed our whole house through 100% secondhand shenanigans.

So, future-Lucy, these pictures look nice, yeah? But remember it DID NOT look this nice for 70% of the time, okay? This room was basically rubbish nearly always. Stop crying.

PS What a bummer it’d be if you missed a post of mine, eh? Follow through Facebook or Bloglovin or even just enter your email to get them pinged into your inbox. I won’t be spamalot, promise!

Our recycled home, Thrifty

Recycled Home: Thrifty Spare Room Makeover

11 July, 2013

We have just 2 weeks left before we leave this little house of ours. Before we go I want to blog a few of the last thrifty makeovers we have done. We didn’t really have any budget for proper overhauls but I HAD to find a way to make each room intriguing and quirky. Enter the whole thrifty universe of second hand – it is amazing what you can do with a few Saturdays spent charity shopping and car booting!

For me, it is all about first making a canvas by painting the walls plain and then creating little tableaus with objects you have found. I do sometimes get a bit distracted picking up tins and vases up and shifting them by centimetres or from room to room, especially if someone is coming to stay.

Our other spare room has mostly had lodgers in it while this box room has been for short visits from people. We’ve had some lovely guests stay – friends from New Zealand, Canada and the US, people that we’d stay up late talking with, who would inspire us with their creative, soulful living. A couple of friends stayed with us for a few months in there before they headed off to sail the sevens seas for a year. Pip was in a band and would fill the house with her beautiful ukelele melodies.

I made this old desk we found a little bit more interesting by painting lines on it with homemade chalkboard paint. The vintage Singer sewing machine on the right came from Oxfam while the one next to it was found in the street. The case was locked and we had a grand old time breaking in to it – would there be an actual machine in it? Or maybe just a mummified Victorian corpse? Both these machines date from the 1800’s – it was well exciting discovering how old they were on this website.

Time gave me this old washing board for my birthday one year – I know! Ha, I’d have been gobsmacked if he didn’t do ALL the laundry. I don’t even know how to use the washing machine. The C came from our local bakers in the greatest street find EVER.

And this is just a little collection of gifts and jumble finds. (Most of which I don’t get to bring to New Zealand with us *cries into pillow singing Titanic to my vintage tins* Near… Far… Wherever you are…)

We haven’t done much to it but it has definitely been a transformation:

all for about twenty of your English pounds. It helps being okay with waiting for MONTHS to find the perfect wardrobe in a junk shop and feeling thrilled by coming across beds on the side of the road. (All our beds were streetfinds.) Secondhand life is the only life for us!

Our recycled home

Please come over and take our belongings

5 July, 2013

We are in such a strange old place in our lives just now. In 3 weeks we are leaving our brilliant little community here in Camberwell for an adventure in our campervan, but it is at least another 7 months until we start setting up our new home in New Zealand. We are SO ready to set off on this family roadtrip, but feeling increasingly melancholy about saying goodbye to our friends and packing in life here on Wells Way.

We haven’t really got our heads around the moving business so things are sat half in boxes, piled in mountains all over our house. We don’t go anywhere or doing anything much because we are overwhelmed by the need to get cracking. So we just hang around swinging in the hammock in the garden pretending everything’s on track.

Then Tim broke his leg, and then didn’t. (He went to A and E after nailing it flying a kite and they told him it was broken and sent him home in a full cast. I spent the night awake, stressing out BIG TIME about how we would be able to get everything done. When he went into the clinic the next day they discovered it was just a bad sprain. We were like WOOHOOOO IT’S A BAD SPRAIN YESSSSSS!!!! And now he looks like quarter of a Transformer with a moon boot thing. People are like “Woah, that’s awful” and we’re like “It’s fine! IT’S NOT BROKEN! Wahey!”

A few days after, I went and got mastitis which knocked me for six (I actually thought I was dying in a feverish delirium) for a good couple of days (so very grateful for my big nursling and my little nursling and a whole jar of raw garlic which sorted me right out) all of which has left us unable to do the car boot sales we wanted to do.

So instead, we are inviting YOU, your neighbour, your neighbour’s Uncle, your neighbour’s Uncle’s hairdresser and the whole rest of the world, over to our place for a House Clearance. They’ll be lots of nice stuff – some of which you’ll recognise from all the posts I have done about the things we have decorated our house with– and also lots and lots of crap such as three quarter full tubes of oil paint and Santa Hats which will be handy for someone I am sure. Please tell any other Londoners about it. And if you come, make your self known unto me. If it is quiet we can have a cup of tea and a nice chat. Here is a Facebook event if you like that and here are the details:

Finding things, Our recycled home, Thrifty

Recycled Home- Garden room make over

24 May, 2013

CRUMBS! Who has had quite enough of babies, eh?! Not of actual babies, Juno is continuing to rock our worlds (in a good way) but, blimey, has this blog gone all babyville or what? Here is a bit of reprieve- a little peep at a wee thrifty makeover we did in our spare room.

One of my favourite rooms in our house is one that began as the most unpromising. It overlooks our garden and we keep trying to pretentiously name it “The Garden room”, but it inevitably only ever gets named after the person who happens to sleep in it the most. At the moment it is called “Jojo’s room” after my sister who comes to stay a little bit.

Here is the BEFORE shot, in all it’s mauve and blue glory:

We carpeted and wallpapered and painted but I think it is the fun bits and bobs we have around it that make it such a bright room.

See this bed? It is made of beautiful native New Zealand wood and is soooo comfortable. We found it about 4 years ago when we were living in a little flat in Kings Cross. We had just decided that day that we would need to invest in a comfortable double bed. That VERY night we found this ON THE DOORSTEP awaiting the morning council pick up for landfill items. Couldn’t make it up, could you?!

I found the curtains in a car boot sale for £5, they aren’t luxury or anything but someone at that car boot sale obviously got the memo that we were creating a “Garden room.” *high fives stranger*

We found the mirror discarded in the street and the two vintage parasols came from car boot sales for a few quid. They only smell faintly of old man’s cigars, hehe. I love their shape and their colours and the delicate imagery on them.

I love these pictures, the image of a hot air balloon WELL fills me with joy! I got them from a charity shop for cheap, they were originally framed in pine which just made them look mega 1990’s Habitat. A lick of white just makes them a bit cooler, I reckon.

(In the first AFTER picture there is a string of stuffed fabric birds hanging out from one of the parasols- funnily enough I bought that from Habitat in the nineties… it is pulling off the nineties much better than pine does I think…)

This is a beautiful retro embroidery given to me by my sister who found it in one of her local charity shops. I’d go so far to say that retro embroidery is THE second hand item to snap up these days, it is so often bursting with colour and can fill a room with nostalgic happiness.

Including the cost of paint I’d say this room cost less than £40 to makeover, a thrifty nook indeed.

I am going to be revealing a few other rooms from our recycled home over the next few weeks. I’ve been meaning to do it for YONKS, so keep tuned!

Have a fab bank holiday weekend! We are off camping with family and friends in Gloster (yes, I’m aware of how you spell it and it’s ridiculous.) Here’s hoping it’s a bit dry sometimes. (Hey, look, this is the hope of a realist- it’s rained and poured every second of every bank holiday camping trip we’ve ever done, I think.) Have fun!

PS I’d hate for you to miss a post… enter your email to get them pinged into your inbox. I won’t be spamalot, promise!

Finding things, Our recycled home, Thrifty

Recycled home – happy imperfection

8 February, 2013

We shift things around a fair bit in our house. We are so often picking up new bits of furniture from street corners (poor, neglected things) and little trinkets from charity shops that we kind of have to wriggle the whole lot about every now and then. We just recently overhauled part of our lounge in a bid to rehome a 1950’s cabinet that was covered in cat wee, which meant getting rid of a 1930’s beasty bureau that was taking up 50% of the room… This is the new craft station that took a while to get up to scratch:

These rearranging sprees have turned kind of extreme at the moment, almost, almost, venturing in to “tidying” territory. I have, in the past, been entirely capable of spending twenty minutes creating a tableau- moving ornaments on a shelf by millimetres, reframing bits of fabric to place there, filling a vintage vase with roses to sit just next to that frame, all the while stepping on raisins, over mountains of Ramona’s toys, moving half-drunken mugs of tea out of the scene. I understand this complete obsession with beautiful things and utter apathy towards mess makes me a bit cuckoo.

However, pregnancy hormones must be kicking in, playing with this inconsistency of mine- I am 30 weeks now, and with each day that passes I find myself, like, doing dishes! And picking the raisins up! Not only shifting around the beauty but dealing with the disarray. Talk about total discombobulation. Blimey, I’ll have a crush on Dave Cameron next.

Our latest big change in the lounge has opened up the room massively, and given us space to upcycle this old shadelesss lamp we found with a map of London.It looks wicked turned on, highlighting the twisting and turning bends of the Old Father Thames.

We honestly found this bench in a skip. Who would chuck this away, eh?

Our house would be even more of a shambles if we didn’t have stacks of vintage suitcases lying around. The ones tucked under the bench were found in Oxfam for a few pounds, the black cornet case in a derelict space, and the glam white one was given to me for my birthday (filled with the pair of vintage curtains hanging by the cabinet – best pressie ever, or what?!) These suitcases are the outer hebridies of my craft station- they hold extra paper and paints that I can’t squeeze in the cabinet (c’mon, have you seen the size of that cabinet? It is teeny, weeny, really…)

With the prospect of selling this little bubble of Camberwell we live in looming, we are going to have to get some paint on these walls to make it all a bit more appealing. We have had the bare concrete exposed for the whole three years here- I love the raw feeling of it, especially with the juxtaposition of all our homey jumble-sale trinkets. In fact, a visitor last week asked us how we did it. Like “How did you get this awesome kind of gritty concrete effect?” Hehe. Hoho. “Pure laziness my friend, pure laziness.”

There is nothing perfect in this house… nearly everything has a bit missing, a chip off the rim or a bit of rust, that is the way of making do, and then falling in love, with a completely recycled home. “Imperfection” for us not only means “bad ass thrifty” but it has come to mean “loved” and “enjoyed” and it is nice having a home filled with stuff that has bought happiness to loads of others in the past too. Even if it does make our house smell of cat wee. (Jokes.)

I have to admit, a bit reluctantly, these tidying up capers make it all even more delicious. I could almost get used to it…. *picks up a raisin purposefully*

These snaps were taken by the one and only Tom Hartford – thanks Tom, he was over here taking pictures of some exciting doilly crafts for an upcoming issue of Pretty Nostalgic mag… EXCITING!
redrosevintage

PS I’d hate for you to miss a post… enter your email to get them pinged into your inbox. I won’t be spamalot, promise!

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