We finally got a new walk-in robe! Well, when I say new, I mean that we got our old 1970s walk-in robe fitted out at last – after 11 years with our old robe. Nala turns 11 this month, and her birthday made me realise that we have been in our house a whole 11
Personal stories and what we’ve been up to
Before & After
Making Over my Mum’s Guest Room (my old teen bedroom!)
For much of my adult life, I’ve had the same recurring dream; I’m in a big house and I discover a secret passage or a secret room. It’s always quite thrilling and I always wake up feeling vaguely disappointed that there is absolutely no chance that my 1970s brick 3 x 2 in Perth suburbia
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Happier Home
A House Clean by Fantastic Services Review (and WIN a Clean!)
Have you ever had a house so messy you feel like you are going to scream? If that’s never been you, I envy you. (And how are you managing to achieve this?) While we have had numerous fantastic once-off cleans and had a terrific weekly cleaner back when our first-born was a baby, for the
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Before & After
Our Tiny Ensuite Bathroom Renovation – Seven Years Later
It’s been a while between posts, online friends. Time feels like it has flown past lately. When we all had to stay at home, the mornings and evenings felt a little slower, but the days still rushed past – and are still rushing past. I wonder if that’s normal for everyone who has kids? With
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Happier Home
How to Work From Home With Little Kids
Wow – how things have changed lately. Without going on too much about all the negative things about COVID-19 – I know we all know it by now! – what it means for a lot of people is that we are working from home… and many of us with children home too. For me, having
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Home Projects
Our Cubbyhouse Makeover
Pass me that mother of the year baton, guys. I don’t get to have it too often, but I totally deserve to hold it for a good minute or two. I won a cubbyhouse! I won it late last year through an Instagram competition held by a local Perth cubbyhouse company called Kidzshack. To enter,
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Happier Home
Make Your Home Beautiful with Bambury (and WIN a $500 Gift Voucher!)
If you are after one of the quickest, most affordable and also easiest ways to freshen up a bedroom or living space, I always think new cushions are a fail-proof way to go. Nothing brightens and lifts a space quite as easily! Add in a fresh new plant and you’ve treated your room or outdoor
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Our House
My Husband’s Big Deck: Our Backyard Before & After
Well, that got your attention, didn’t it? Blame my shrunken, shriveled brain, but somehow I have totally neglected to share a big part of our home renovation here on the blog – our new patio and deck, which is about thirty times nicer than what what our once-daggy 70s house had there before. (Those before
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Happier Home
Bedtonic – A Local Linen Business I Really Love (and a Giveaway!)
I always admire it when people don’t merely just dream or talk about doing things, but they actually go out and give them a red-hot go. It makes sense that I frequently admire small business owners, professionals and creatives, and one of my favourite local businesses is also run by one of the nicest women.
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Home Projects
Spray Painting Our Old Colorbond Sheds
Recently I tackled a DIY project at our place that had been on my to-do list for a LONG time – spray painting our old Colorbond sheds black. Woohoo! I know they are just sheds, but they look SO much better now that it legitimately thrills me. I had it in my head for months
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Happier Home
Why Hobbies Are Important (Especially for Parents)
Lately there’s a saying that’s been doing the rounds on social media – that to help maintain overall health and wellbeing, you need not just one, but precisely three hobbies. One to keep you fit, one that exercises your creativity, one to make you money. It’s a very neat and clever little idea, and I
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Home Projects
Florence Broadhurst Blinds for Your Home (and WIN!)
Would you like Florence Broadhurst patterned blinds in your home? Or would you prefer to design your own pattern and have it printed and custom-made just for you? Whatever your fancy, you can have the most stylish windows going with one of the newer window treatment companies to make waves on the market, Blinds in
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Nerd Life
14 Great Books About Houses: My Reviews
If I was down to my last $20, I’d probably buy a coffee and a book… maybe a novel about a house. Me at bookstore *Spies book with pretty old mansion on cover* TAKE MY MONEY I am very partial to a story where an amazing house is almost a character. And I’m a total
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Our House
From Bugcatchers to Bluetooth LEDs: Our Lighting Makeover
“I just want lights on a dimmer,” I used to say to my husband every time the topic of new lights came up. I remember when I was growing up and my friend’s house had their lounge room lights on a dimmer and I thought mood lighting was just the most incredible fancy thing I’d
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Happier Home
What I’d Buy on Facebook Marketplace Today (If I Wasn’t Broke)
I was a teenager the first time someone told me I had an addictive personality, and I didn’t know what it meant. “Oh!” I said brightly. “Meaning people find me addictive?” I was picturing myself as this alluring, magnetic creature. “NO,” they shot back rudely. “It just means that you get addicted to things very
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Nerd Life
A Little Post for My Dad
This week’s blog post is for one of my biggest critics and one of House Nerd’s biggest personal fans (well, at least I like to think) – MY DAD. He’s probably reading this right now while grumbling to himself, ‘When is she going to get a real job?’ however, one of the bonuses of me
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Our House
Nearly Finished! Our House’s Cladding Makeover (and How Much it Cost)
Little Nerd is at his Oma’s house, Mr Nerd is at work, the dog and the baby are down and I’ve had two coffees by 9am. What better time to snatch some blogging time at my desk and hastily share some progress photos of our Scyon Walls cladding makeover. (If you haven’t seen our before
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Nerd Life
Miss Nerd’s Birth Story: A Short Labour, but an Epic Novel
I haven’t blogged in a little while… and if you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you might have seen why! We recently welcomed our sweet little baby girl Miss Nerd to the family. She is a sweetheart; a smiley, cuddly little koala. She has been warmly welcomed to our family, especially by Little Nerd,
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Our House
Our Living Room Makeover Series: The Before Pictures
Even though our living room is one of the two rooms in our home where we spend the most time, after years of living here, I still never felt like we had fully finished it or properly styled it. A little embarrassing – most people seem to do the living room first, don’t they? I
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Nerd Life
My ‘Babymoon’ at Townhouse Margaret River – and My Must-Do Things Down South
After we found out we were having another baby, I started a little bit of a mental baby bucket list. Just some fun things I wanted to do before baby number 2 arrived; things I knew would not necessarily be impossible to do with a newborn in our midst again, just trickier. I was so
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Happier Home
How a Freezer Club Can Make You More Organised (and a Giveaway!)
My freezer club started with a jar of homemade tomato sauce left on my doorstep. A friend of mine had messaged the girls group chat and said she’d just made a huge vat of veggie-filled passata but had way too much – would anyone else like some? Four of us said yes please. I added
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Nerd Life
Shooting a Video in our Home for Karndean Designflooring
A little while ago we had a promo video shot in our home for Karndean Designflooring, the company we got our awesome vinyl floors from. If you follow me on Instagram you might have seen my post from the day; a little clip of the boys filming Little Nerd playing while Nala harassed them. (Sorry
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Nerd Life
How to Get Through a Crappy Pregnancy
If you come here just for the home-y stuff, this post is probably not going to be your cup of tea, sorry. If you are here because you are pregnant and hating it, read on! I’d like to preface this post by first saying I’m not a horrible or ungrateful person… honestly. I know some
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Home Projects
How To: DIY Beautiful Shampoo and Bathroom Bottles
There’s nothing like stepping into your beautiful, blissful bathroom renovation, carefully designed in a minimalist colour palette of tasteful neutrals… only for your eye to be immediately drawn to the stash of colourful, garishly labelled shampoo and conditioner bottles in your shower. Am I being a little OCD? Yeah, I know it’s a first world
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Home Renovations
Making Over Our House’s Elevation: The Progress!
Well this has been one very exciting and very busy fortnight! January 15th finally came round – the date the guys from TJP Carpentry were scheduled to start on our Scyon Walls mixed material makeover, and they’ve almost finished! We’ve still got to finish the painting, tidying up and a little replanting of the gardens
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Home Projects
A Tiny Bedroom Reveal: Little Nerd’s Nursery
So, most bloggers probably share their baby’s nursery when they’re still pregnant, or maybe in the months after the newborn has arrived. Most probably don’t share it when their little person is two and a half years old… and they’re uh, pregnant again. Clearly I am not most bloggers! But better late than never, right?
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Nerd Life
So Guess What…
So guess what guys, we have some news… I am pregnant! We are expecting our second baby in early July 2018 – I am 17 weeks along. We just found out what we are having – a baby girl this time! I hope she likes Enid Blyton and drawing house plans and Tomb Raider and
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Nerd Life
Renovating our House: What I’ve Learned and My Advice for Renovators
“If we ever renovate again, I would…” “Our next house, we should do this…” These are words Mr Nerd and I have uttered to each other many a time as we’ve been ankle-deep in renovation rubble here. I am still FAR from a renovating pro, but we’ve learned a lot of things through trial and
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Our House
Making Over Our House’s Elevation: The Design
So I’m excited to share that we are about to start our Scyon Walls™ elevation makeover! Not long ago I shared in this post that we were going to be making over our house’s elevation with a modern mixed materials look in collaboration with Scyon. We also had a designer on board to help us
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Advice
How to Make Any House Feel Like Home
When you were growing up, you probably dreamt of the day you’d have your own place. I was way too dorky to get invited to house parties and do normal teenager things like hook up with boys, so daydreaming about my future house was pretty much my hobby. One of my first (and quite possibly
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Advice
Thinking of Doing an IKEA Kitchen? My Pros and Cons List
A while ago I wrote about how we gave our old 1970s kitchen an IKEA kitchen renovation, completing it (kind of!) just in time for our baby’s arrival. (These pics above were taken by the lovely Alanna of Earthbound Images when he was nearly four months). I also shared our IKEA kitchen renovation diary. Since then I’ve had a
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Our House
We’re Renovating Our House’s Exterior! Our Before Photos
The renovating bug is a sneaky thing, isn’t it? Once you’ve been bitten by it (or the home building bug, which I hear is as equally infectious) it’s never long after you throw down your paintbrush one day and swear, “That’s it! I’m done! I’m not doing any more renovations,” that bug raises its little
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Before & After
Our IKEA Kitchen Renovation: Before and After
So today I finally have a before and after to share with you – our kitchen renovation! (Finally!) I had putting off doing this Before and After story for ages because I was waiting til we could renovate one of the biggest elements (the floors). But now it’s done and I couldn’t be happier, even though
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Home Renovations
How We Turned Our 70s Bar into a Walk-In Pantry
So I have exciting news – our new walk-in pantry/scullery renovation is finished! I think this may actually be my favourite renovated room in the house now (although I think I say that about every room once we finish it, even the toilet). But I AM in love with our new pantry. I first learned about
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Furniture
A Roadside Find: Thonet Chair Makeover
Don’t you just love an exciting email out the blue? When a design-savvy House Nerd reader dropped me an email a little while ago to tell me that it was verge collection time in East Fremantle, I was out the door and driving thataway before you could say let’s-drag-home-some-more-junk (thank you, Deb!) Hey, I can
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Before & After
My Monica’s Closet: My Junk Room to Craft Room Makeover
Hands up if you have a junk room in your house. Or a junk cupboard? Come on – at least a junk drawer? If you have none of these, and your entire house is as organised as Martha Stewart’s pantry, I envy you. But if you have that messy part of your house that has
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DIY
Our Budget Sunroom Makeover – & How to Spray Paint Aluminium Windows
If you grew up in our sun-bleached country, like me, you will be familiar with one of the great Australian home features – the ubiquitous sunroom, or sleepout. When I was a kid so many of my friends’ houses had a sleepout – and so many still do. Commonly tacked onto the back of 60s