But now it is a home and we’ve made a good start on the bathroom already! More pics of that to come.

Swoon at the black tiles in the kitchen! Such large spacious rooms (especially for our money)! Nice sized garden; perfect for vegetable growing, barbeques, chickens? But that wallpaper in the bathroom?? YUCK! Great to sell the house, but not to live with, and that’s why we started there first.

Nothing could be better suited to my mindset at the time.

I’ve been planning things in my head ever since we saw the house but now that we were days away from getting the keys I started to put some of those thoughts down.

And now, I have several rooms to do this for. Planning and browsing and researching and buying. I’m in interior design heaven right now. I think I just did a little wee from the excitment. Over share?

I’ve been renting now for 8 years, before that I lived with my parents. Not once have I been able to paint, decorate or even afford to buy what I wanted for a room. We now have a blank canvas and HELL, I’M GONNA GO CRAZY!

Here are all the rooms we have to play with. So. Many. Rooms.

The plan is to start with the bathroom, then I think the kitchen, hallway, stairs and landing, convert the store room to a proper utility room, lounge/diner and the bedrooms last.

I am so eager. I just need to take my time and get it right. I certainly won’t be getting into debt, as much as that dining table and chairs tempts me.

The process has been somewhat lengthy in my opinion, especially considering we are first time buyers with nothing to sell and the house was empty. But really it has come at the right time; we wouldn’t have been ready a month ago and we needed to give a whole paying months notice on our rental flat.

So finally this week came the end of the process, the light at the end of the tunnel! Firstly I got an email from the letting agent…

Of course I dumbed down my excitement and replied with professionalism, something to the tune of YAY!!!1! WAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!111!!!!1!!!!

Then yesterday I got the email we’ve been waiting for from the solicitor to confirm completion of the house sale.

Again, more WOOOOHOOOOOOOOOing, and a bit of *does a little dance*.

So off I popped, on my lunch break, down to the estate agent’s to pick up the keys. Our keys. The keys to our own bricks and mortor. A place to call our own. Home sweet home.

Apparently, we have bought a prison…

How many keys can one house need?! So now I am Jailer Fowler, tasked with finding out what each of these keys is for and where the hell you get one of those huge prison guard key rings from! Perhaps most of them are for our secret dungeon where we can keep prisoners? Or for the turret where we keep a princess trapped forever until her prince comes to rescue her? And the dragon we use to keep the princess quiet.

But it’s true, we now own a house and damn, I am excited! Moving, decorating, fixing, BUYING STUFF, that’s all to come and I can’t wait.

You’ll approve as heartily of the typography … an achievement as dynamically different as Random Mel‘s future-fashioned style. The styling is equally appealing, it’s way beyond your expectation and exactly inline with your hopes. Step straight into beauty – visit Mel, today!
SPEC: WordPress blog design and build

SPEC: WordPress blog design and build (based on existing artwork)

But the look and feel itself is only a tiny part of the experience we created that’s needed to provide a niche social network – loads of groups of interconnected committees and teams, custom profiles for more than 50 league members. All of these features must be skillfully designed, efficiently built and – in the case of the Dolly Rockit Rollers – installed by a league member so it can be developed and extended at any time.

This is a big part of the forum’s job as the source and venue for all things Dolly. And an important reason why they are able to take a good, dependable online service for granted.

SPEC: Buddypress community design and build

o yeah, I created this weeks ago and it’s sat on my desktop since then. I’m finally getting round to posting it!

This little type adventure is born from a combination of things that happened to me around Christmas:

1. I got a dribbble invite. One of those much sought after things that I happened to get by luck from one of Jadu‘s users, Paul Stanton from University of Leeds. The point of dribbble is to post a teaser of whatever project you’re currently designing, or as they put it “what are you working on?” They’ve kept the community on an invite-only basis so as to maintain the high standard of design so it’s very much an honour to receive an invite.
2. I went to an antique centre with my family over Christmas and stumbled upon some copies of the Illustrated London News from the 50s. Needless to say the vintage adverts are incredible and some of the typography is to die for. I was particularly inspired by a logo by a sugar manufacturer Cadestro. I had a lot of fun playing with the dissolve effect in photoshop.

Et voila!

ver the Christmas break I spent most of my time revamping my site, and when I say that I mean I spent most of my time playing with Brownstone.

I discovered Brownstone when the second edition of 8faces popped through my door featuring an interview with Ale Paul of Sudtipos. Sudtipos publish some of the amazing fonts I’ve been drooling over for a long time including; Semilla and Monroe. I am now also considering extending my overdraft just so I can purchase Piel Script, Affair, Lady Rene and the rest! Using such a quality font is a breeze – no kerning required and a MASSIVE choice of alternates.

So dotted around the site you’ll find little bits of Brownstone. I found it to perfectly encapsulate the feel I wanted for the site; cute, friendly and feminine. Hope you enjoy the new design!

etting into the spirit of the season this week I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

To create this weeks type adventure I used some of the techniques I learned in a VecTips tutorial but mainly I was inspired by Jessica Hische’s Snowflake ornaments. I spent a lot of time playing with different combinations to create the background pattern, it is so addictive!

The colours are from this palette at Colour Lovers, the script font is HL Netco 1BK and the sans serif is Nevis.

I hope you have a fantastic festive period!