My eight-week renovation of our Downstairs Loo is complete and I can't wait to show you the ...

My last progress update before the room reveal next week brings the 3P's of plumbing, panelling, and ...

With only two weeks left in the challenge, our downstairs loo is edging ever closer to its new ...

How are we already at the half-way point? Thankfully, I also feel like we've passed a significant turning point with our downstairs loo (powder room/half bath), when all traces of the old room disappear and I finally start to feel like we're at the point where the new room can begin to ...

Week 3 of the One Room Challenge brought a battle with the toilet, some meddling with the door frame, and a decision on ...

It's just the first progress report of the One Room Challenge and, wouldn't you know it, the project has ...

For my fifth time around at the One Room Challenge, our downstairs loo (powder room) is getting a whole new ...

Remember my friend Julie? She's the one who is living in a rented house that she wants to make feel more like her home, but on a very tight budget. We've already transformed a bedroom for her two little boys, and created a relaxing master bedroom for her and her husband. Next we turned out ...

If you've been following the blog for a while, you already know that I like to take annual stock of the progress in the house at this time of year and make plans for the coming year ahead. You will also know that I'm not always completely successful at sticking to my goals, but yet just the act of ...

Our homes are the principal environment in which we live our lives and, as such, we cannot afford to underestimate their impact on our quality of life. Decor is not just the superficial adornment of walls and floors; it actually facilitates how we live our lives every single day. Our house doesn't ...

I recently did a budget makeover on a bedroom for my friend's two little boys and today, as promised, I'm sharing my follow-up post with all the tips I learned along the way for creating beautiful decor on a shoestring ...

I have always claimed that you don't need a big budget to make a house a home. Now that's all very well and good to say, but it's important to note that the idea of a "big budget" can mean very different things to different people. So when a good friend recently asked me to help her to decorate a ...

When I attended the House Event last year, it had already become a show that I marked on my calender as a must-see event. So I was delighted when the organisers invited me to attend this year's event in my capacity as an interiors blogger. Hubby and I set off from Galway on Saturday and had a ...

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited as an interiors blogger to attend a special pop-up DFS Home of Colour created and curated by the Kingston Lafferty Design. It was a wonderful event, filled with decor inspiration and "new" friends ... plus a fantastic surprise at the ...

Six weeks of planning, scrubbing, painting, sewing, and accessorising have come to fruition and it's time to reveal my "new" craft room! I consider it a luxury to have a whole room dedicated to these passions, but I definitely hadn't been making the most of the space until now. With the addition of ...

Last week was all about painting, and this week was all about sewing. I also made some improvements to my workspace and have some exciting styling opportunities coming ...

This week has been very pivotal in the transformation of the room. Gone now are any traces of how it used to look, the major DIY jobs are completed, and I've started to introduce some of the new decor items to the ...

The transformation is now well under way in my craft room. The room already looks so much brighter and fresher, and I'm excited to see it become a lot closer to my vision for ...

Last week, I shared all the before pics of my craft room, so today we get to enjoy poring over all the decor details and see what I've planned for the room. One of my favourite parts of renovating a room is playing around with moodboards and making plans for what the "new" room will look ...

I can hardly believe it's time for another One Room Challenge; that crazy attempt to completely makeover a room in just six short weeks with updates posted every Thursday on the blog. This time around, it's my craft room that's up for a ...

It's that time again when I take stock of the year just gone and start to make plans for what I want to get done over the new year. 2017 probably wasn't my best year in terms of sticking to my resolutions, but I do have a good excuse - honest! Plus I'm already making big new plans for ...

Happy solstice! Today may be the shortest day of the year, but inside is merry and bright. It's time for my annual house tour of festive decor, and this year I've chosen a very pared-back rustic scheme of whites, silvers, and ...

The One Room Challenge is always precisely that: a challenge. Having decorated our guest ensuite and sun lounge through the ORC, I already knew what it would take. It's relentless. But despite how tough it is, the reason hundreds of us keep coming back is because it's always worth it in the ...

It seems strange that Week 6 is here and there’s no room reveal. In case you missed the news, due to the number of natural disasters affecting participants, Linda (who organises the One Room Challenge) has – for the first time ever in the history of the challenge – allowed us an extra week to ...

When you live in a house that needs a lot of work, there can be many obstacles to getting it to a finished state. The interesting thing is that I recently realised that one of the biggest obstacles is actually MYSELF. However, I have a new motto and now I'm getting stuff ...

All I have to say about this week is: hurray for visible progress! After spending all of last week on the necessary, but hidden, work, it feels so good now to have moved onto working on something that we will actually see in the finished ...

The past week has been spent working on all that super-annoying invisible work that is absolutely necessary, but which doesn't make you feel like you're moving forward very much. However, what you see it not always what you ...

It's been another weeks of ups and downs as Ex-Hurricane Ophelia put work on the One Room Challenge on hold for a few days. Thankfully, despite flickering lights all evening, we never did lose power, and so I do have some progress to report on the ...

The One Room Challenge seems to go by more quickly each year, but this week saw me working on restoring an antique fireplace, choosing my true blue, and making preparations for installing my favourite feature in the room: pocket ...

The One Room Challenge is back for its twelfth season, and I am back for my third time! If you haven't seen it before, this is a room makeover challenge for bloggers that must be completed in six weeks, with weekly progress updates posted every Thursday. This time around, I'll be creating a ...

It's that time again, but this year the back-to-school season has taken on a different meaning in our family, as my sister has just moved into her new house ... except that it's not new at all; it's actually a Victorian-era schoolhouse that has been beautifully restored and ...

Do you enjoy touring magnificent houses? I sure do. During the lovely sunny weekend just gone, I got together with my friend Sarah aka The Creative Yoke, who suggested a visit to one of her favourite spots near her home: Killruddery House & Gardens. She knows me well and, by the end of the day, it ...

This is my second time doing the One Room Challenge and this time around was just as testing and intense as before - and also just as rewarding. It feels as though I have hardly lifted my head from the sewing machine for the past three weeks but, when I finally did, there was a brand new room in ...

Welcome back to my One Room Challenge, where I try to redecorate one room in just six weeks. If you've been following along, you will already know that it's our sun lounge that is getting the once-over this time around. And this week, that has mostly involved lots of ...

I did it - I made curtains! Well, to be more accurate, I made one curtain. Haha! This week has been a steep learning curve for me, but I'm actually feeling very good about what I've accomplished because I always enjoy acquiring a new ...

How is it already Week 3? That means we're already at the half-way mark of the One Room Challenge. Yikes! This week's work on the sun lounge makeover has been all about the woodwork ... and a little bit of ...

It's funny how you can live with something mediocre for so long and be fine with it; but as soon as you become aware of something better, it becomes unbearable. So it was for me with our sun lounge. It felt very cathartic to spend the week purging the room of everything that I'd overlooked, but ...

The sun lounge was the first room in our house that made me feel like home. We hadn't even bought the house yet, but it was our second viewing and the estate agent gave us the keys to let ourselves in. We asked some family members to come along with us - we figured it was better to have some extra ...

Insiders Secrets is three-part exclusive interior design & style event organised by the House/EDIT duo, Claire Price and Elaine Regan, in association with Fleetwood paints. The first event took place in Sligo on March 11th, and I was delighted to attend the second in the series in Galway last ...

One of the reasons I started blogging was so that it would serve as a diary of our progress in the house and also make me accountable for commitments I make to undertake projects. Last year, I shared with you my yearly resolutions for the house, and confessed which of those succeeded and failed. ...

Well, what a whirlwind six weeks it has been since I first embarked on the One Room Challenge with the goal of decorating our guest ensuite from scratch in just six weeks ... with Hubby and I DIYing everything in the room ourselves. This was my first time taking part in the ORC and, despite the ...

It's Week 5 of the One Room Challenge - which means just one more week to the final reveal! Because we just had some guests staying with us, there were a few days this week when we didn't have access to the room or much time to work on anything for it. But we did manage to wrap up a few half-baked ...

Hallowe'en is my favourite festival of the year ... candlelight, log fires, dressing up, cuddling up on the couch to watch spooky movies - I love it all! And today I'm sharing some of my favourite Hallowe'en décor inspiration from around the ...

Well, last week's One Room Challenge update definitely ended with a cliff-hanger, didn't it? In fact, this project has tested us more than any other - not one aspect of it has been without some disaster or other. To add to that, we also had some time constraints with guests coming to stay for a ...

It's Week 3 of the One Room Challenge - that means we're already halfway! And what an eventful week it has been. On the one hand, it's been great to start making some visible progress at last. But we also encountered a significant setback that leaves the entire project in serious ...

Week two of the One Room Challenge involved doing a lot of mostly hidden remedial work. Our house was built during the Irish property boom and, as such, suffers from the poor quality of workmanship typical of that period. That means that, as usual around here, we had to fix a lot of what was wrong ...

The One Room Challenge, which takes place each April and October, involves transforming a room in just six weeks while blogging the process with weekly posts each Thursday. The room I'm tackling is the guest ensuite shower room as it is the only remaining room in the house that is virtually ...

Our anniversary of moving into the house just passed, and Hubby and I were reminiscing on all we've done with the house since we moved in. When I asked him which is his favourite room in the house, his reply was: the master bedroom. The master bedroom is one of the rooms that we finished pre-blog. ...

This room reveal seems long overdue because it's been almost done for such a long time ... about a year, in fact. But there were a few finishing touches needed, and they were DIY projects that I didn't get around to working on until quite recently. Now, at last, I get to show you how our guest ...

As our sitting room underwent various paint changes recently, I was surprised to see how much colour can affect our perception of space. At times it seeemed as though the very shape and proportions of the room changed with each new application of paint. Fascinated, I decided to document ...

With the sitting room makeover going further than we had originally intended, I was unprepared for coming up with a full design plan for the room. Unable to gestate my ideas for as long as I usually like to do, I find myself relying on sound design principles and a carefully-considered process to ...

The first time I travelled abroad was as a sixteen year old on a student exchange to Germany. I arrived the night before Easter Saturday and when I woke up the next morning, my hosts had left a little surprise in my room for me: an Osternest (easter nest, a presentation basket of easter chocolate). ...

Lá Fhéile Pádraig shona daoibh! Happy St. Patrick's Day! What better way to mark our national holiday than by celebrating Irish style? Here's my pick of some quality homewares inspired by traditional Irish design that can easily be incorporated into a range of decorating ...

Project Sitting Room has taken on a life all of its own! As this room undergoes a much bigger makeover than we ever had planned for it, I take a look back at where we started ...

... and before you know it, you find yourself bang-smack in the middle of another decorating project. Please tell me I'm not the only one that happens to? This time, it all started with: the ...

Valentine's Day is just around the corner, so what better time to think about showing your home some love? In the spirit of the day, I thought it would be fun to have a look at some love-inspired items for around the house. These would also make wonderful gifts for the interiors-enthusiast in your ...

Candles - and scented candles in particular - have got a bad rap recently with numerous headlines about candles slowly poisoning you in your own home. But thankfully there are plenty of great alternatives that are made from natural waxes and which contain essential oils rather than toxic chemicals. ...

Setting goals helps me to set priorities and to maintain focus when things don't go smoothly. Even when I don't succeed 100%, I definitely achieve more by trying to reach my targets than I would if I hadn't set goals at all. The house, however, was not something I used to set goals for, but last ...

Art Deco is my favourite period historically. It also happens to be the period during which dedicated bathroom spaces became prevalent in the home, and so the Art Deco style is somewhat synonymous with bathrooms in my mind. And it is a style that I think stands the test of time and that can exist ...

These are probably some of the most "raw" before pics of a home decor project you are ever likely to see! Most of the rooms in our house have had at least some cursory work done on them, but there are a couple of exceptions: the non-essential, nice-to-have rooms. One such room is our ensuite shower ...

Hurray! The downstairs loo is finished! And I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. It's is velvety dark with burnished gold accents and an eclectic collection of curios that give this tiny room a larger-than-life ...

Most times I'm decorating a room, I have a starting point; something I like, such as a fabric or a piece of furniture that I want to feature. But how do you get inspiration when you're starting point is an empty magnolia box? Well, sometimes inspiration comes and takes you somewhere you never ...

This is the last bedroom to be decorated! Being the second guest bedroom (there is a separate guest suite), it just wasn’t a priority - especially when we had so many other more pressing projects to do in the house. But it has always been a bit of an embarrassment whenever we did need to ...

I have always loved rich, dark interiors, but have had mixed success with them in our own house. It has worked brilliantly in our hallway, but we ended up re-painting our bedroom a shade lighter. Given the difficulties we were having with the white décor in our loo, I thought it was time to boldly ...

Our downstairs loo (wc/half bath/powder room) is a small space, so we followed the convention of decorating it in light, bright colours. Well, what a terrible mistake that turned out to ...

We bought our house in rural County Galway in the summer of 2006, at the peak of the property boom in Ireland. It was what was called “builders finish". Our house had no flooring, no bathroom fittings, no kitchen, no landscaping, and an unfinished driveway. Ceilings were painted and most (but not ...