Charity Shopping

Since today was (is) such a beautiful looking day, my wife and I decided to go on a little jaunt. We had a quick look at google maps to decide where we'd walk and chose to walk up to South Park in Oxford. We figured this would be a nice little walk, and after checking which roads we needed to look out for, set off. 

Upon getting to the park, we realised it was much too cold for just sitting around, although the view was gorgeous, and decided to continue on, into Headington, where we thought we'd scope out the charity shops. 

View of Oxford from South Park

We know that there are many charity shops in Headington and that they have a generally good range and quality of products as we have visited them many times, and even bought a large proportion of our wedding crockery/glassware from them. 

One of the charity shops in particular proved to be excellent this morning, with a 'camera special' occurring this weekend. There were plenty of old cameras, with a polaroid that I quite wanted. We however decided not to get it as it would be so expensive to buy film :(

In the end, we ended up buying something much more exciting though: handfuls of photo slides. There was a basket of them in the front of the shop with a tag outlining they were 20 for 99p. What a bargain! We therefore spent quite a while having a look at the different slides, some of which seemed to be high quality images and rather nice. We ended up buying 40 of them, so our total purchase was just under £2, and we knew we'd be able to make something with them. 

And just to give you an idea of the kinds of images we bought, I've tried to take pictures of a couple of them, although it didn't work out too well!

At some point we think we might make a lampshade (or two) out of the slides (as shown here), although we have no immediate plans to do this. I'm also relatively sure that my Grandad has more of these slides that his aunt took, so if it works out well with these slides, we may at some point reclaim those and put them to good use also! All in all, an excellent Saturday afternoon walk and a marvellous purchase.

A New Chapter

It feels like an awfully long time since I posted on here, but I've been more than a little busy. Since returning from Barcelona on August 26th, my wife and I have been in the process of moving ourselves 100 miles from our hometown. We picked up the keys for our new rented flat on the 28th and proceeded to move all the stuff we'd been saving in a storage facility those 100 miles ... all in our Fiat 500! It's taken us five journeys (and around 900 miles) so far and we still don't have everything here. 

That first week where we went back and forth three days in a row was very tiring, and then just a week after getting into the flat, I started work! A new flat and a new job, especially when you've spent the last year getting to stay at home and be crafty all the time, seems rather crazy, but there you go. Why wouldn't you want to do everything at once?

You might be wondering why we've moved 100 miles away from the rest of our family, but the answer is simple: my wife still has a year of university to complete and Oxford is where that is. I wasn't about to let her go off on her own now, was I?

In just under three weeks, we've mostly set up our flat the way we'd like it (thankfully it was furnished) and a lot of it has just been waiting for services to be switched over and on. We managed to get a Sky subscription installed last Friday and the phone line and internet have only been active since yesterday (thank goodness for iPhones!) so we're really getting there now. 

So here you, a quick look at the place we're calling home:

Bedroom

Lounge

Dining end of the lounge and door to the kitchen

We're especially enjoying having a separate kitchen with an oven and actual space to prepare food. That and being able to put up the frames we had stored has been really nice, along with having much more space to be in than we had in our teeny tiny French flat!

Well, what do you think of our new abode? Any ideas of where we can get a cheap chest of drawers to supplement our clothes storage? Any of you moved home recently too?