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Enjoy this stunning vintage home tour, packed full of secondhand gems.

I came across the vintage home of Bristol-based blogger Lou Archell on Design Sponge. And, gosh, I instantly fell in love with her Victorian terraced house packed full of secondhand and vintage finds. I’m a big fan of using secondhand furniture and Lou has really used her furniture to great effect. Our own home is very much a work in progress so I’m definitely using Lou’s vintage home for inspiration!

The Kitchen

Their modern kitchen is complemented really well with all of Lou’s vintage and artisan accessories. This could pretty much be my dream kitchen.

The Living Room

At the heart of their living room is a cosy wood burning stove. If I could pull up a pew here, with a good book in hand, then I’d be a pretty happy Wendy!

The Dining Room

The dining room’s pièce de résistance is surely the William Morris wallpaper, which complements the vintage furniture and accessories beautifully. The stuff of dreams I tell you!

The Bedroom

The bedroom feels simple and relaxing. I love the idea of using an old chair as a nightstand.

The Bathroom

Even the bathroom has the secondhand treatment with this beautiful old mirror, customised by Lou.

You can see the full vintage house tour over on Design Sponge – I highly recommend it!

Lou blogs at Little Green Shed, where you can see more glimpses of her stunning vintage home. All photos were taken by the talented Laura Pashby.

You might be wondering on the progress of our new house? Well, we’ve fitted a new bathroom. However, we can’t finish the room due to a problem with penetrative damp on one wall, which we’ve just had a pretty hefty repair bill for. Hopefully this will be sorted out ASAP!

We installed a wood-burning stove in our living room a few months ago. However, we haven’t yet found the time to paint over the dark brown paint that currently adorns all of the living room walls (and our bedroom walls!). We’ve also just had the plans drawn up for our new fitted kitchen, which we hope to have fitted in the next couple of months. As soon as the house is in a better state than it is now then I promise to share the photos!

PS: more house tours here!

I have declared July to be the month of slow living in our house. In other words, I’m quite happy to be a hermit this month, potter around at home and in the garden (and the allotment), and just enjoy the summer with my little girl and my other half. Slowness is definitely the order of the day.

Here’s what we’ve been up to this July.

Our Allotment

Our allotment is overflowing with summer raspberries at the moment. We didn’t plant them – the last allotment holder must have grown them – but we are very thankful for them. Raspberries for pudding every night! They taste especially good when you have a little helper picking them for you!

Thanks to the last allotment holder, we also uncovered a ripe crop of strawberries under some grass! I’m so glad we didn’t go in and willy nilly clear the plot because so many good things have popped up that we didn’t know about when we took over the plot in January!

Gardening This July

We’ve also done a bit of planting in our garden this July. When I say garden, it’s really just a little concrete yard with some borders to grow plants, but we absolutely love it. Our allotment is only two minutes walk from our house, so it kind of feels like an extension of our garden.

I finally planted a hydrangea, which has been on my garden wish list for about 7 years! Behind the hydrangea is a houttuynia – it’s actually edible. My other half got the inspiration to plant it from James Wong (his all-time favourite allotment book!). We haven’t eaten it yet – apparently, it’s good in stir-fries – so I’ll be sure to report back when we do! It can spread quite a lot, but we’ve planted it in a very controlled area – it’s bordered on four sides by bricks so it should stay contained!

We also planted some lavender plants in the border for the bees. The lavender is right by our back door so it’s really nice to walk out of the door and smell the lavender.

When we were planting the hydrangea we accidentally snapped a stem off of the hydrangea so rather than letting it go to waste, I popped it in a little vase I found in a charity shop. In the same shop, I also found the old McEwans beer bottle which I couldn’t resist either. My other half despairs sometimes!

Snail Woes

Finally, for some reason snails absolutely adore our little concrete yard, even though there’s not too much greenery and a lot of gravel down. As we’ve planted some nice plants that we really don’t want to get eaten, and haven’t had much luck with any other methods of natural slug/snail control, my daughter and I have started “Snail Patrol”! Snail Patrol involves going round the garden every evening before bed, collecting all the snails we can find. We then pop them into a pot, and then deposit them in the woodland down the road from us. So far we’ve removed about 30 snails, and my daughter loves it! She’s absolutely fascinated by snails!

Needless to say this book – The Snail and The Whale by Julia Donaldson – is a new favourite in our house! I love it as much as my little one! Definitely one of Julia Donaldson’s best books.