It's the small things in life ...

.. That make you happy. So, I thought I'd share some of the little touches around our house that make me happy.

The pretty, coloured clothes pegs that Joe bought for me on a business trip. Is it silly to like your pegs? If you're going to do at least a load of washing every day, due to the dirt-magnet toddler in your house, you might as well have nice pegs :-)

The sea-worn bit of wall we found on Lindisfarne. We picked it up and bought it home just because we liked the look of it. Presumably it had been bumping around in the sea for years!

The iron pigs that guard our drainpipe!

The little corner of the kitchen that holds the lovely bread board given to us by our good friends Matt and Rachel on our wedding day, and my Jamie at Home spice racks. There is one more rack to go up, and more jars, so that they are all the same (although with different coloured lids) but they are still in my demo kit at the moment!

  

Our downstairs loo! It's the first finished room in the house and I love it. The wallpaper, the bookshelves, the funky magazine rack and the framed print of one of the readings from our wedding. We made it too nice a place to be though - Joe spends far too much time in there!

The 'love' framed maps, next to our front door. It's an idea we saw on notonthehighstreet.com and we adapted it a bit and created our own. It's old style maps of where we had our first date, got engaged, got married and went on honeymoon. The wooden heart above it was carved for us by a masai in Kenya, where we had our honeymoon, and has our wedding date on it.

The sketch of our house, drawn by Joe. It's not the first house we've lived in together, but it's the first we've chosen and bought together, so to me, it feels like our first family home.

A few pictures from our bedroom - the second room to be decorated and almost finished (we need to find a dressing table or chest of drawers, and new bedside tables). I love the wallpaper. It's 'Summer Palace' in duck egg from Laura Ashley and I bought it a couple of years ago, to put in the old house. Once we'd decided to move, I saved it for this house and fortunately there was just enough for the new room. Not every wall is papered. We colour matched paint to the background colour for the other walls - one of which is home to the lovely drawing of stargazer lilies that Joe gave me on our first married Christmas - they were the flowers in my bouquet and on the cake at our wedding and are my favourite flower.  The little cat doorstop is another Laura Ashley sale bargain and I fight a constant battle with Evie, to leave it where it is, because it's a doorstop, not a toy :-)

The last photo is my 'Bear Hotel Rodborough' bear. He came from the hotel that we stayed in on the night before our Friday wedding (we had 2 weddings - that's another story) and he reminds me of the lovely afternoon we had there, having afternoon tea and playing croquet on the lawn with our parents and my brother, before our 'proper' wedding the next day.

There are many more memories dotted around our house, but those are the ones that jumped out at me as I mooched around with my camera today. I'll talk about the others another day.