Home & Garden archive

Despite my best intentions, it was inevitable that raising £20,000 to buy my ex out of our joint mortgage was an optimistic endeavour at best. Right from the beginning I had to factor in a more realistic plan: remortgaging the house for the value of the outstanding mortgage with our joint provider plus the £20k… read more →

After Flymo pretty much demolished the majority of my seedlings earlier on the year, my enthusiasm for the garden waned somewhat. I lost interest in the daily maintenance required to keep the beds free of dandelions, grass pathways free of nettles etc and the continued (mostly) good weather has given everything a massive boost. I’ve… read more →

Anyone got any recipes for rabbit stew? Someone’s been a very bad rabbit. After moving the rabbit and guinea pig hutches up to the gap at the back of the top lawn (I know this means nothing to you unless you’ve seen my garden) last month, we’ve been able to give Flymo access to the… read more →

Further to my last dairy free post, where you’ll remember I moaned that everything contains dairy, I set about creating a meal plan for the week (having seriously lost my mojo with the whole planning thing since going dairy free) and hit a bit of a stumbling block when I realised that both of my… read more →

We had some sunshine here in jemjabella-land today, so despite the chill in the air, everyone was wrapped up warm and shoved into the garden (and as such both kids were asleep for 6:30pm despite Oliver having late nap!) I’ve re-potted my strawberry babies from the runners last year into their allotted tyre and did… read more →

This has been sat in drafts for so long, I figured I’d get it fixed up and posted otherwise it’ll never see the light of day! This is my easy “pea”sy fish pie recipe (it’s a pun, I’ll get to that shortly ;)) For the record, I make my recipes up as I go along… read more →

I didn’t think it had been that long since I cleaned under the sofa last. And yet, having just done so, I found… teething toy rattle pair of pants (Isabel’s) 2 socks (1 x Isabel’s, 1 x Oliver’s) large Lego wheel 8 mega bloks 1 bulldog clip number 3, number 8 1 hairclip 2 hair… read more →

Is scraggy a word? Firefox isn’t flashing me the wiggly red line of doom… When we moved into this house (the ‘omg mega debt’ house) there were carpets throughout. We made the decision to rip out the carpet in the front room and replace it with cheap vinyl; we did this for two reasons: 1)… read more →

Spurred on by your suggestions in my plea for ideas post, Karl and I have set about hacking at the living room this week. We’ve pulled off 90% of the paper, started removing the hideous and uneven polystyrene coving, and replaced the skirting that was — for some absurd reason — nailed to the wall… read more →