Over the winter working from home is a tricky business. Especially tricky when the majority of your work involves taking photographs! I shoot in natural light and there have been days over the last 3 months that I've wanted to sit in a heap of tears, when the sun barely showed it's face. 

My absolute saviour has been our leaking conservatory, bolted onto the family room and kitchen. It's important you know it leaks because I want to set the scene for this latest behind the scenes post and see if you can help me with some ideas for making the most of it.

The space is fantastic, it doubles as a playroom for the boys and a work space for me, you can just about see the steps to our offices above the garage in the background of the photo below - which I must show you soon - and the most perfect diffused natural light pours in all day long.

I move furniture in and out, drag armchairs in and set up a coffee table scenario, wheel the marble topped console which acts as a makeshift kitchen island in and out, pin fabric to the wall to the house and over the course of a week my desk over flows with props and table cloths and anything else that has been featured.

I can work well into the afternoon, even when the rest of the house feels like a bat cave and at the end of a day I try to clear away all the petals and props and the boys takeover after school. I've hung masses of bunting from the ceiling to try and hide the plastic roof panels that really need replacing and even though the Lego heads often double up as rain catchers when the water pours in during a heavy storm, I feel so lucky to have this extra room. 

It's like having a home photo studio. When I have to dodge the golden hour sun rays I just pop everything on the floor! I use a reflector too to block out light when I need to and the boy's desk chairs come in handy for still life compositions and stools for overhead shots.

So many of my Instagram gallery photos are taken in here but this month I have also made the most of outdoors too and my sideboard was the perfect backdrop to my Pantone Colours of the Year post over on the Roost blog. 

Our garden is always strewn with toys and balls but for this blossom snap I turned a blind eye and cropped them out, focussing just on the blossom itself! And there are a couple of extras in this post that I will be sharing tomorrow. 

What I hope these posts do is highlight how you only have to tell a little of a story. Little details can be just as engaging as a full picture. And I move the rubbish out of the way when I need to! The tidy surface in a new Mother's Day afternoon tea feature I am writing for Laura Ashley this week is so much prettier than the mangled bags and plastic pots and Sammy walked in just at the moment I was taking the photo! I took it again without his cheeky hand but actually loved it more when I loaded all the images onto the laptop. 

You can take something quite ordinary and make it seem extraordinary just by cropping out the rest of the scene!

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In dream land we'd replace the conservatory with a beautiful orangery kitchen extension but that's a fair few more pennies than we have, this decade at least!

I adore the idea of keeping a glass roof, in an old house with low ceilings having a view to the sky and vaulted ceiling makes such a difference to the feel of a room. Ours is pre fancy glass that keeps it cool in the summer and warm in the winter, but all we do is keep a small fan heater handy in the colder months and use baskets and boxes for toys in the summer to stop them being bleached by the sun.

The local listed building officer agrees there is the potential to one day do something special and knock through the wall of the kitchen and incorporate the footprint of the conservatory into a modern family kitchen and dining room. Isn't this house is West Sussex the ultimate inspiration?!

You can find all our dream plans on my For our forever home Pin Board, so pop and have a peek.

Image credit deVOL Kitchens

Imagine the windows at the back of the house are all in the same style as the french doors... painted grey like the front door. Do you think it would be worth painting the exterior and interior woodwork to match?

I spotted some tile paint the other day and thought that could be a good way to freshen up the red window ledge too - anyone ever tried tile paint before and could give me some tips?!

This year the basic foundations of the house are our top priority, a new heating system and new electrics, so it's needs to be a quick fix type job. Replacing some seals around the really drafty windows and go crazy with some sealant in the leaky patches!

But I believe a lick of paint could transform it, maybe whitewashing the stone under the window cills? What do you reckon?!

Joining in with The Ordinary Moments

I'm excited to share my first post for Roost today. It's a brand new collaborative home interiors site that I am so proud to be a part of. I'll be sharing a monthly colour trends and inspiration post and this month it's all about how to decorate and accessorise your home with the two Pantone colours of the year - Rose Quartz and Serenity.

Head over to the Roost blog to check out my top picks, something for every budget and a way to bring a feminine pink and hazy blue into your home this year.

They are subtle but stunning colours that together create the most serene paring.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I spotted this dress in the sale at George at Asda. An extra something for Yasmin to go with her Easter egg this year and a perfect partner for my hydrangea plant in the hallway.

So are you a pastel fan? Can you see yourself being tempted with these new colours?

Take a minute to check out Roost and let me know what you think, what you'd love to see more of!

If you've read the story about finding our forever house you'll know what had me at hello. 

We were actually en route to another house viewing having sort of ruled out this quintessential English country house on account of being listed. 

Having always loved living in new build-ish houses after our uni days the thought of taking on the responsibility of a listed property felt so enormous we had kept scrolling through the house listings even though in every other way it was the perfect house, albeit needing more than a little modernisation. 

We drove through the village tentatively, a surreal feeling of warmth swept over us and by the time we got to the house itself we both had the “this could be the one” feeling.

The garden got me. The huge peony bushes at the rickety garden gate, the creeping roses over the stone window frames and the view.

Some days, when a cupboard almost falls off it's hinges, or another tap starts leaking, it can feel like we haven't made much progress at all, but really we have done so much to make it feel our own and I want to share these changes in a new series of posts called #housegoals charting our inspiration and before and after transformations!

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We love the garden it as it is, no wait we adore the garden as it is, but there are corners that have so much more potential. Trees begging for rope swings, a home made tree house for boys to climb in and fruit trees that drop the most amazing amount of apples, plums, pears and damsons, that I have to confess don't get collected and made into jam like they used to by the previous owners. My father in law does a good job pottering off to the bottom of the garden and coming back with the bottom of his jumper filled with apples like a carrier bag!

So now we have bigger still stripy boys running a muck, barefoot in summer and winter, I chase them down the garden path begging them to put on wellies or shoes, who love to hide under the low branches, and pretend to go camping in the long grass. 

There's two areas I would love to makeover for the summer. Last year we were away more weekends than we were at home and I could only count on one hand the number of times we ate at the garden table on the patio. Not for lack of good weather and balmy evenings but because we were racing around so much.

This year we've promised ourselves we are going to have an open house policy for the holidays and invite lots of friends and family to us! I want to make the most of the pergola and plant up some big containers on the patio to act as road cones and slow down the scooting that makes me gasp with fear when I see two boys head towards a flight of stone steps.

I am always searching the internet for inspiring garden ideas. Patio designs, beautifully symmetrical vegetable planters and lusting over those huge hanging egg shaped seats.

We went on a night away to Tetbury last year and spend hours going in and out of all the vintage and antique shops. Every one we went into was bursting with ideas for our country garden. 

I have this dream of collections of galvanised pots and old dolly tubs brimming with flowers, and a long metal table that can stay out all year, with metal folding chairs that I can make comfortable with squishy padded cushions in every colour of the rainbow.

And lastly on my wish list is a quiet, tucked away greenhouse just like my neighbours.

Quite frankly I want to move into hers. Shelves for rows of old jugs, trays full of succulents, everywhere you look there is something so curious and intriguing. 

Whilst I may not be anywhere near as green fingered I really want to make the garden feel as much like us as the house does. We've planted a few extra bulbs, some more peonies at the back and the first of the new pom pom Dahlia bulbs we inherited from another generous neighbour flowered last summer. 

Oh and these beauties that grow at a local walled garden that I discovered last summer. I need them in my life!

It's a much bigger project, a garden rather than a room, but the results are everlasting. You don't want to change the colour of the turf as trends change!

What would you have on your garden wish list?

A collaboration with Homify