Restoring the Old Girl

Cheeses are the reason for the season
On Saturday we had a mini-working-bee. We dusted and vacuumed, mopped and tidied, rearranged and tarted up. The reason for all this activity was of course our guests on Sunday.
The house ended up looking fabo. I've brought the daybed in from the verandah and put our persion rug down too. It's a bit mish mashy, but it works. Lately, I've been following instinct rather than magazine pictures.

Needless to say, we also had beautiful flowers to celebrate the occasion. Sorry about my terrible photos, they could all do with a bit of cropping and some colour correction.

My husband and I also whipped out and got ourselves an early Christmas present. This is our new little Yamaha Ipod dock. It's white and grey and sits quite unobtrusively on the kitchen bench. Looove having music again.

We had our lovely neighbours over in the afternoon for a lot of cheese and champagne.....and cherry-topped patty cakes.
We couldn't ask for better neighbours, they're tops!!

Although we consider our neighbours to be very special, our extra special guests were actually here earlier in the day.
A week ago or so I called Mrs Baby to see if she and Mr Baby would like to come and see our handy work. As coincidence would have it, Mrs Baby had only just posted me a Christmas card with a note saying they'd love to come and see the house.
It was so good to see them. Mrs Baby  follows this blog so she had seen a lot of photos already.  They were interested to see some of the original furniture in the new context.
They didn't stay long unfortunately, but we planned to have a lunch or something next Christmas, and we'll also have more work for them to see.
Now, a small confession, Euphemia is not the real name of our house. Euphemia was Mr Baby's mother, and she grew up in Scotland in a village called Motherwell, and that is in fact the name of our house.
This is the old copper sign at our front door.

This photo below is the Baby family. You can see Mr Baby standing in the centre, as the youngest of the family. That's Gwennie on the right hand side with the plaits, and that's Doris sitting on the left. Euphemia is on the right hand side of Mr Baby.  They all grew up, and some of them grew old, in our house - and it is our house now. It definitely feels like home.

This is Mr Baby yesterday when he visited. That's also Mrs Baby and me and my offspring. They will be the next children to grow up here.

And that is where our story will end, on-line anyway. We still have lots of work to do, but we'll plod along at the pace that money and time allows.
Thank you for reading my blog, and giving me your encouragement and advice. How wonderful are blogs! They are a window into someone else's life and they allow like-minded people to link up all over the world to share ideas and inspiration. I'm looking forward to resuming my role as the voyeur.
Thank you of course to Mr and Mrs Baby for giving us Motherwell. If she had gone on the open market,  competition would have been so fierce I'm not sure we would have ended up with her. We consider how lucky we are every day.
Now I'm off to prepare for the new year. I'm positive on January 1, I will awake to find myself a brand new person who eats well, exercises every day, doesn't drink, saves money and is well organised.  I may even find little blue birds circling my head, Snow White-style.
So from me and Motherwell, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.