A Slow Sunday | country towns, home shopping, & coastal walks 🌾

Grabbing my book and a cup of tea and sitting out on the deck in the morning sunlight is probably my favourite way to start the day and with the weather at the moment at this time of the year, sunny days for us are just sort of few and far between, so any chance that it is a sunny morning you can guarantee that I will be out there doing exactly that because it just sets the perfect tone for my day. I've had such a nice start to the day and I also have had a very very busy week and a lot of things that I'm really excited to share with you guys. One of them being our trip, so we have officially booked our holiday for later this year. Now I did mention in a previous video that we were only going to be doing Canada and North America but we did end up deciding to book the UK as well because I miss it so much, we both miss it so much and we're so excited to go back and we're going to be there during the summer so that's going to be a completely different experience from what we've had previously which was like autumn and winter. Yes I'm so excited to get back, we'll be in the UK for just under three weeks, London and the Cotswolds and then we're actually going to be going to Scotland. I've never been to Scotland before and I'm so excited to visit. Now we have around I think 10 days or 12 days something like that free and we're thinking we'll just spend it entirely in Scotland but we're also contemplating maybe splitting it up and maybe doing Scotland and another part of England but we're more leaning towards Scotland so if any of you guys are from Scotland or if you've been to Scotland and you have any recommendations please let us know because at the moment we have nothing booked and no plans we just know that we want to be in Scotland. Obviously visiting Edinburgh, we'd love to go out into the countryside as well and then from there we're going to go to New York, Montreal, Toronto for our friend's wedding, San Francisco, Yosemite and then back home so I'm really really excited. It's still five months away but it's kind of like all I can seem to think of at the moment and the fun part is planning it all. I think that half of the holiday is the planning of the holiday and the looking forward to it so a lot to look forward to. The other thing that I've been really really busy on this week and that I'm so excited to share with you is that I have finally finished renovating my kitchen hut. Now I did have full intentions of showing you the full renovation process but I just, with the weather, it was just too difficult. It has just rained so much and I was kind of just working on it really sporadically. Any sort of free afternoon that I had or if I had a couple of spare hours here or there I would just go down and do a little bit of work on it and I finally got it finished and I really really love it. I'm really happy with how it's turned out. It's so cute. I can show you a before and an after but I'm really pleased with how it's turned out. We did have a couple of hiccups which I'll show you in a moment when I actually show you the kitchen hutch but for the most part it was been a really fun and rather straightforward process. It was not complicated, just tedious, just time consuming but it's finished now so I'll show you the before now and then I'll show you the after. So this is our little hutch. As you can see it's got this gorgeous little scalloped edge all around the top here which is so cute. You can see here is the drawer that I've already started stripping some of the varnish. We've got this beautiful sort of detail here and it goes all the way back down in here as well so I think our first step is we're going to take the drawers out and the doors off and we'll probably work on those first. So then this is the finished piece. It's so cute. I'm so happy with how it turned out. I did use the oven cleaner on the doors and the drawers which was really good at taking off both the varnish and the color so then all you needed to do was sort of give it a brush, wash it down and let it dry and then sand it but as you can see here on the doors we quickly found out that the doors weren't actually made of pine but it was more of like a laminate that they'd put over it so then down the bottom here it actually ended up kind of caulking a little bit the more I sanded it so that was really disappointing and I don't really know how to fix it. I thought about just replacing the doors completely but I might do that a little bit later on. As for the main frame as you can see there's the scalloped edging and the shelves and then this sort of paneled backing on it so there was a lot of nitty gritty little areas to get into. We used some varnish cleaner on it and that actually ended up giving us this really nice rustic look where it didn't fully pull up the color so you can see here just sort of above the shelves where there's a little bit of darker color that's actually residual from the varnish and we actually kind of liked it made it look a little bit more rustic rather than looking too polished. So now comes the fun part of actually styling it so I do have some inspiration that I'm going to be referencing from Pinterest and I have rummaged through my cupboard a little bit as you saw I put a couple of things on there including the candle that I made last week which I think fits really nicely but we are hopefully if it's open going to head to this antique store in a nearby town and then might check out a couple of other shops as well and see what we can find. I think I might look at the op shops but in my previous experiences I haven't really had much luck and kind of what I'm looking for I think is a bit too specific. Anyway let's go let's go and explore the towns and we'll see what we can find. Look at all this beautiful Easter stuff that they've got in this is so cute I just love it. We ended up going to a couple of shops I feel like we drove all over the place looking at so many different stores the antique store that I really wanted to go to was actually closed so I'll have to go there another time and we did actually end up going into an op shop I found a couple of really cute pieces so I'll show you what I did get and then we can get to sort of styling it. So this first piece I've had my eye on for a really long time actually I first saw it in the store I think it was the end of January and I took a photo of it and I said I'm gonna get this one and this felt like a really good opportunity to get it the only thing is I really hope it fits because I think it might be just a little bit too big and it's this gorgeous little jug I love the little blue pattern on it and I love the little frilly sort of wavy opening to the vase but as you can see it is quite big and I'm not too sure if it's gonna fit so if it doesn't fit I mean I'll obviously still make use for it because it's so cute but I love it and it was 20% off so even better I was actually really pleasantly surprised when we went to the op shop because I didn't think that we were going to find anything but I did actually end up finding this lovely little cup and saucer set two piece so I've got two cups and two saucers and this set was two dollars like can you believe that look how cute it is I love it's got the real rustic farmhouse look to it so I think that's gonna go really nicely last little thing that I bought was a little bit random um but I thought it looked really cute and I just kind of couldn't say no and again it was from the op shop and it was only two dollars so I thought if I don't like it I haven't really spent too much money on it and it's this little um cottage cottage sugar sugar jar with a little lid and spoon I think that's so cute I love the little cottage on it yeah another little op shop find I didn't find a lot and I think this is going to be the sort of thing that I just sort of build up over time as I find things that I like I really want to get some um little candle holders um we did actually see a couple of um like electric candles obviously I can't have an actual candle on this it's timber I will burn the house down but yeah I did find a um so I might go back and get those when I actually have candle holders so for now I think let's style it with what we've got and I'll see if I can find anything else in the cupboard and we'll see what we can sort of put together I think my little hutch is so cute and I also think we did pretty well with the styling considering we bought one brand new item and the rest were six dollars from an op shop I think we've done a really really good job I cannot wait to just keep picking up lots of random little knickknacks and I'd love to get some art pieces there's actually this artist that I've been following on Instagram for so long and I adore her pieces and I think one of her pieces will just look perfect styled in my hutch so I'm really really excited for that but it's just going to be the sort of thing that I build up over time anyway I think considering it is still such a nice day let's go for a walk but instead of going for a walk in the coastline considering how close I live to the beach it is a wonder that I don't get down there more often I genuinely just don't really go to the beach that often here and anytime I do have some free time I genuinely I spend it more often in the countryside really lucky where I live in Australia on the Sunshine Coast is the coastline and the countryside are within half an hour 45 minutes away from each other so we do have the best of both worlds you have this most amazing countryside and beautiful countryside towns but then you also have this incredible beaches I just don't go to the beach that often but I think considering it is such a beautiful day let's mix it up and let's go down to the beach