Hello Readers, 

Today's post I am super excited about, its my entry for the Laura Ashley Room Refresh competition being hosted by the wonder Annie from The Quarter Life Tales of Annie Bean in conjunction with Laura Ashley, with a prize of a £1000 gift card for Laura Ashley for the winner. 

When I first started thinking about my entry for the competition I thought about my own room. I live back at home with my parents now, and I am back in my old room, however, when I came home I updated it and have all brand new furniture and redecorated the walls. My room is pretty much sorted.

So, to cut a long story short(ish) I have decided, with the permission of mum, use our front room as my blank canvas, and if I should be so lucky to win, the £1000 gift card will be spent on her front room so together we can create her dream room, as a way of thanks for everything she has done and all the support she has given me over the years.

So, on with the refresh!

This is our front room...

We essentially have two living rooms, this room (the front room) and our back room in which we have our big comfy corner sofa and TV. The front room has our posh suite in it, but being the room that you first come to when you get in the house (the front door opens straight into this room) it is often full of bags, shoes & other belongings (usually mine) which haven't yet made their way to my room.

We moved into this house 11 years ago, when I was 17, and throughout the years I have been to university and moved back, moved into my own place and moved back. Every other room in our house has been decorated except this one and its the one room that we've wanted to do for years, but we just never got round to it. 

Me and Mum run our own craft business so this room often doubles up as our craft room, so we have lots of crafts bits and bobs, a table as well as boxes all over the place, that really need sorting. As well as being a front room & a craft room (phew!) its also mums office as she works from home.

For this room we're looking to make it functional for crafting and for mums office work, but also for those things to be cleared away and have a home, so it works as our front room as well.

So, how would I refresh our front room?

I started by thinking about the walls, at the moment we have 3 walls papered and 1 painted, sort of a reverse feature wall, and it works well and it would be nice to keep that the same, but brighten the place up. For the walls I went with Josette Carnation Damask Wallpaper with a painted wall done in Pale Amethyst. For the curtains I went with the Lyton Pencil Pleat Ready Made Curtains to finish of the walls nicely.

The sofa and chair we already have are Purple (Sofa) and Cream (Chair) so I wanted to keep this theme throughout the rest of the accessories for the room.

The Jasper Footstool would be a great addition to the room, making it feel more of a relaxing room once the the computer has been shut down and the sewing machine switched off for the day. For those cold winter evenings (although we really don't want to be thinking about those just yet!) I picked the Lemington Polka Dot Cotton Throw in Amethyst.

As I mentioned before, the front mat is often littered with (my) shoes, so this Stair Basket would be a great addition. 

Both Mum and I are HUGE accessories fan, I think little bits and pieces can really help make a house a home. Mum wants to change her cushions and she loved this new Charleston Cushion. Having new carpet is definitely on the list for the front room, but this Hoxton Rug in Amethyst will look great on the current carpet or the new carpet (Mum fancies herself a dark cream/beige colour). When picking our some little extras these Boxes caught our eye, and I think they would look wonderful in the room. And how can crafters like us not buy this Needlework Storage Box.

I have absolutely loved dreaming about redoing this room, it has so much potential, and we have a few bits of old furniture (the sideboard for one) which we are going to strip down and re-paint (and distress) to fit in with our ideas. 

What do you think of my ideas? Would you do anything different? Do you have any great storage ideas? 

Have you entered the #LARoomRefresh competition? Please leave your comments below, I would love to see how you would redesign your spaces!

P.S: If you would like to enter the #LARoomRefresh Competition, get yourself over to The Quarter Life Tales of Annie Bean and you to could be in with a chance to win £1000 to spend refreshing your room for spring at Laura Ashley!

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To start this story at the beginning, lets rewind back to 2011. I was looking for a new flat to rent and after days of trawling through rightmove, what looked like the perfect flat came up. It was trifle expensive, but there would be three of us living there, so the cost really wasn't too much. We called up the estate agent, and organised a viewing. The lady we spoke to indicated that the flat had received a lot of interest, and it had only been put up on the website that morning. We arranged a viewing for later that day, and immediately fell in love with it, put our deposits down and moved in.

Fast-forward 6 months, a change in circumstances and the end of our lease.

I had moved back home and was now living with my parents. I had paid my rent up until the end of the lease and was waiting for it to all come to an end.

One day, I was sitting at work after a conversation with the estate agent regarding my deposit (when they told me I would receive it back in 'a couple of days') and it dawned on me that I had been named the lead tenant on all documentation, and I had been the one who received all the documents for our deposit being but into the safety deposit scheme. I remembered I had logged in once, six month previous, when I received the documentation. So on my lunch break the next day, armed with my details I tried to log into the website. 
On the 5th February 2012 I logged onto the website for the first time and was able to view my deposit. I decided to give the DPS a call as I wasn't sure why it said my deposit status was closed or why a wrong email address was registered on my account.

I called the DPS (Deposit Protection Scheme) and after proving who I was, and explaining that I couldn't log in, I found out some alarming news. My deposit was gone, all £825 of it, from the scheme that was supposed to protect it.

Before I continue, I think it is best I explain how the scheme works. When you submit your deposit for your rented property your landlord is obligated to put it in one of these schemes (I think there are at least 2) and your deposit remains safe in there. When the tenancy ends, you, along with your estate agent fill out the release forms together and any agreed deductions and given to your landlord and the rest is refunded to you.

The man I spoke with at the DPS told me that my deposit status shouldn't read closed if I had no idea why. He then informed me that on the 29th January a new email address was registered on the account. Later that day an email from this unknown email address was sent to the DPS, containing all my personal details and details of my tenancy, and requested a new repayment ID number. The DPS have informed me that aside from me, nobody should have access to my repayment ID number and it is essentially the same as a pin number you would have for your bank account. The estate agent would definitely not have access to this number. It was because all the details in this email were correct and all security information verified that the DPS replied to this email, issuing a new repayment ID number. I didn't have access to see the forwarding address, and because of data protection the DPS were unable to tell me what the forwarding address is, however she could confirm it was not the forwarding address of where any of us moved too.

The DPS also informed me that on the 1st March 2012 a joint repayment was registered by the estate agent, and that this meant what should of happened is I would have been invited to go into the estate agents where we would fill out a joint repayment form on the DPS website, and at some point in that process I would enter my repayment ID, if I agreed that there were no disputes relating to the money. This form had been filled out without my knowledge, using the newly acquired repayment ID, that had been sent to the unknown email address. Therefore the monies had been released. 

The DPS had advised me that a fraud has taken place, with someone using my personal details from a false email address, posing at me to obtain my repayment ID. 

I spoke with the agent in the first instance to try and establish what was going on. I asked what had happened and was concerned my personal details had been used to gain something without my say so. The lady I spoke to got very angry with me very quickly, and when I explained what had happened she said "Well we have all that information anyway", which largely they do, but not the repayment ID. I stated that they may have my personal information but that doesn't give them the right to use it. She said they would need to check on the DPS from there end, I was told I wasn't able to hold and that they weren't able to access the DPS. However she did tell me they had the funds and they would be released to us. 

It was very clear what had happened - the estate agent had clearly pretended to me, changed the email address with the DPS, gained my personal pin and pretended to fill out the joint repayment on my behalf and gained out monies back.

Of course I didn't get my full deposit back, of course the agent disputed things like cleaning costs, thats why they went to these great lengths in the first place. I couldn't dispute the money, it had been removed from the DPS and therefore was unsecured money. The whole point in the scheme is so if there is a dispute, the money remains safe until an agreement is come too. By removing my deposit from the DPS the estate agent took anyway any rights I had to contest any deductions.

Angry as anything, I decided to take action. I was in touch with Consumer Direct who pointed me in the direction of Trading Standards, where I lodged an official complaint. I was advised to also lodge a complaint with Action Fraud, as everything that had happened constituted Fraudulent activity and Identity Theft. I spoke with Citizens Advice and they, as well as the others, all pointed me in the direction of the Police. However, the police didn't want to know, they said it was a civil matter, despite Fraud being a criminal activity. They didn't care and didn't want to know, so that avenue was cut off. 

I found out a lot of interesting information about the regulatory bodies for Estate Agents, which basically boiled down to not a lot, and I sent out a lot of queries, but my agent was not registered with any of these bodies and therefore they couldn't help me. Another dead end.

So next I set about to find out just exactly what the hell the estate agent thought they were playing at. I sought advice on the letter and wrote a great letter outlining the way I perceived the situation. I copied a letter to Trading Standards and Action Fraud.

I received a cleverly crafted letter back, clearly designed to throw me off and make me give up. They said the release of my deposit was due to a 'clerical error' caused by a unique chain of events. It did not allude to what there chain of events were, or how they managed to get the only copy of the new repayment ID. 

Again I sent another letter, trying to establish things and picking apart their letter as I went. 

Although due to the lack of support from the Police, and the badly regulated Lettings sector I wasn't able to get anything from this (all I wanted was the right to contest the charges), after 4 letters that went nowhere, and after seeking further advice, there was little I could do. Small claims was an option but I had just been made redundant and didn't have the money to file the claim, and the amount they took from the deposit wasn't worth it, not with the costs I would have incurred. 

All I wanted was an admission, in fact, all I really wanted was to be able to take it further with the police due to the theft of my identity to gain access to my personal details and therefore gaining an advantage by releasing my money and not giving the whole sum back, but it wasn't too be. 

It annoys me that they go away with it, but I hope my constant badgering and letters at least made them think twice before doing it again. I can only presume this is something that they do all the time and a lot of tenants don't know the ins and outs to know they are acting illegally. 

I just hope this isn't common practice. The DPS was set up to protect the Landlord and the Tenant, and this situation just proves that out there, at least one Estate Agent is bending the rules and taking what they want at  whatever cost to the tenant.



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Working with felt is one of the easiest ways to create gorgeous pieces to scatter around your home, and something that is super easy to get children or beginners to try out!

Takes these hearts we've been making, they are easy to make and look gorgeous hung around the home.

All you need:
Felt
Thread
Buttons (to decorate)
Stuffing

How to make a felt heart:
1. Cut out 2 identical shaped hearts out of the felt you are using (you can use the same colour or two different colours - it is entirely up to you!)

2. Line them up together, and using blanket stitch, stitch around the outside of the heart, binding both sides together.

3. Leave a small gap towards the end of stitching, and stuff heart with a small amount of stuffing to pad it out.

4. Finish stitching and close up the hole.

5. Decorate the front of the heart however you wish.

6. Attach some thread to the top of the heart.

Let me know if you try this, it really is a great, fun way to make cute little bits to decorate your home!
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When I saw an idea for a product in a magazine (I think it was 'Sew' but I can't be certain...) I decided to give it a go and see how I did with my own variation.

As usual I plowed in head first, not really thinking too much about how I would do it, and sort of had to develop it further as I went along, and despite taking the best part of the afternoon I couldn't really fault the way it turned out!

I started by cutting out some squares in felt to the desired size. I decided my wallhanging would contain three squares, all centred around a pink theme, yet all different in colour, yet corresponding with each other.

For each square I cut out two squares, the one that I would sew on to and one to use as backing to hide all the horrible stitching that you would be able to see.

I decided 'Home Sweet Home' was a good slogan for all a wall hanging and quickly decided that I would have the image of a house, a heart and flower, to represent nice things about the home.

So I got to work...

I started by sewing a border on each one, so I knew what area I could work within, and I then got to work cutting out the house, heart and flower to fit.

I stitched each one to their square, using blanket stitch, and also using threads which correspond to the colour theme of the piece.

I then set to work sewing "Home Sweet Home" in freehand.


Next I attached the ribbons to the help it 'hang' and threaded in some buttons to make it look pretty.


Last of all, I attached the backs, to hide all the ugly stitching, and sewed them to the front, using blanket stitch.


Although the whole thing from start to finish was very easy, it was time consuming, but I overall I am very pleased with the end result!
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