Loving life – and spending less!

My avid readers will know that guest bedroom didn’t always look like that.

When me and hubby moved into this house, it became clear that decorating ideas needed to come thick and fast. The guest bedroom walls had chunks out of them and were painted lilac. The thin blue carpet was threadbare in places, and stained with drips and drops of lilac paint. The faded floral curtains were mounted on a wonky, plastic curtain-pole. I bought a double bed, but was startled to discover the prices of brand new headboards and resolved to find one in a charity shop (I never found one).

The only other furniture was an wobbly IKEA wardrobe called BILLY that was left by the previous occupier. This is our guest bedroom so it was so utterly important to be welcoming to friends, I found myself apologising whenever people came to stay.

Sometimes it pays to buy, not upcycle.

I only buy the best stuff. Such as a limited edition Graham & Brown wallpaper, a stupidly-posh Schreiber bedhead (RRP £449) and a set of G-Plan bedroom furniture.  See, I said I wouldn’t scrimp on quality! The cost for that lot? A little over £600, including the wallpaper paste. I am swimming in money pretty much, but I don’t like to boast. This is about being a penny pincher but sometimes you have to spend some of it!

Now I don’t want to show off too much readers.

I did make two purchases for this bedroom that, while heavily discounted, were still jeffing expensive. (That Schreiber bed was one; the carpet was another). I’ll come to those at the end.

A couple of years prior, when it was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and there was a Royal Wedding and British memorabilia was all over the place, I won a move of excellent backdrop in an online challenge. It was restricted release Graham and Brown backdrop called Jubilee Design, and it was amazing. The backdrop was delineated with pictures of 1950s women in New Look dresses, with Big Ben and Tower Bridge out of sight.

I had an issue: a solitary move of backdrop doesn’t extend far. Not except if your divider is, little. Be that as it may, I cherished it and I needed to discover an utilization for it, so I accumulated it.

Accepting reality.

When we moved into this house and needed to brighten the visitor room, I realized the backdrop would be impeccable… and I pondered, since its getting late that had passed, in the event that I could discover old moves being sold inexpensively.

I got lucky on the first go: when I checked the Graham and Brown site, the backdrop was still there – on freedom. It had been diminished to £10 a roll. I purchased two moves for £20, with an additional £2 shipping. So I wound up with three moves of tip-top originator backdrop for £22. Nothing more needs to be said. Now and again, irrational accumulating satisfies!

However I underestimated just how much I would like this furniture. I’m even thinking that when we renovate our own bedroom (which is pink and flowery and bad right now – but that’s for another post), we could move the G-Plan furniture in there, dressing table and all, and find a couple of bedside tables in the Brandon style. I really like MADE.com stuff, but they aren’t cheap. Although I do use this site to find vouchers for them, I just sit back and watch it work. It’s incredible – I recommend you try it, if you search for voucher codes online like me. They never work!

Don’t be too surprised if you see this big ole’ wardrobe and these drawers popping up on another post here in the future…

Galaxy S8 – My Review

Carphone Warehouse – thank you! – have selected me as one of their guinea pigs to test out the Galaxy S8. I have an old, clunky Galaxy S6 Plus so I was very grateful. In other words, they were sufficiently thoughtful to loan me the Samsung Galaxy S8+ for a month alongside a months information, calls and content stipend. For one thing, I’ll let you realise that I have had an iPhone as far back as the iPhone 3G turned out 9 years prior and some would state I’m a touch of an Apple nerd!

Be that as it may, now and again you must take a stab at something new! This survey depends on my standard utilisation of a mobile phone as a parent and a blogger. It would be ideal if you note that my examinations are against utilising my multi year old iPhone 6S+ I think I became hopelessly enamored with the plan of the telephone straight away – it was so gleaming, smooth, just looked and felt incredible!

It has a marginally extraordinary charger from past models which implies you just have the charger that accompanies the telephone and not the numerous different links you have around the house.

The expandable memory is an or more for me as my iPhone is at present the 128GB form so I adore the way that there is the standard 64GB model of the Samsung S8+ which you would then be able to help the memory with a smaller scale SD card as I probably am aware many individuals battle with telephone memory. All the typical applications you would hope to be accessible, for example, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, are in the Play Store prepared for you to download.

By the way check out these cool Wonder Woman covers/skins for this phone – ME WANT!

Apps, and more apps!

Searching for the greater part of the applications which I use all the time and the two I couldn’t discover were Canva and Tweetbot. There are a lot of Twitter applications accessible, anyway I couldn’t discover one that kept my perusing place in my channel and records very like Tweetbot – it may be the case that I simply hadn’t discovered the correct one!

The Google Photos application is immaculate to use on this telephone for support up your photographs and recordings. You can set this to back up out of sight so your photographs and recordings are upheld up straight away.

The battery life endured throughout the day, even with heavier use than ordinary amid the time I was off work – something I battle with on my iPhone when I normally need to convey a battery pack in the event of some unforeseen issue!

Photographic Quality

For me, as a parent and a blogger, photograph quality is a significant factor with regards to picking a telephone. You need to catch those valuable minutes in the most ideal quality for thinking back on in years to come.

To summarise, I would give the Galaxy S8 a 9.6 out of 10. It is much more affordable now to buy on contract as well. So thank you for lending it to me – I don’t want to send it back. Will I be arrested if I keep it?! 😉