A Mini Home Haul And Lou On Beauty

Having spent most of the last week wandering around IKEA and building flat pack furniture you could say that I'm a little bit sick of houses and home renovations . After recent living room and bathroom changes, the house is still upside down and my plans for my own bedroom and my office space have been shoved right on the back burner. Their time will come though  and in the mean time instead of buying sensible things like more coat hangers, storage and paint, I will continue to buy pretty, if not necessarily practical things.

The bulk of this haul comes from H&M, and despite my need for prettiness and frippery, the first couple of things are pretty sensible, we'll always need bedding so I took advantage of the sale section on the website and ordered a few things.

A little while ago now I ordered a gorgeous lilac, grey botanical print duvet set (read about it here), I loved it and it's been on my bed almost constantly since I got it. In the sale section there were a few matching items so I decided to get them and build up my botanical print collection. The first thing that I got was a lovely, soft matching fleece blanket. It was £6 and although it's big enough to cover my double bed, it's quite warm so I think I'll be using it as a bed runner in the colder months.

As well as the fleece blanket I also got a couple extra pillowcases to match my duvet set, which were £3 each. Since I sleep with both a top and a bottom sheet, I don't change my duvet cover any where near as often as I change my sheets and pillowcases, so they were a good investment.

The next couple of H&M items were full price but I couldn't resist. It's a bit of thing at the moment to be a blogger and to be obsessed with pineapples, but I've loved pineapples for as long as I can remember. I love the taste and I love how they look, I had a soft toy pineapple when I was younger, and I was lucky enough to inherit my grandmas kitsch 1960's plastic, and glass pineapple ice bucket, so it's fair to say I've got history.

I bought the silver pineapple glass jar a little while ago (see it here) but when the gold version came back in stock I couldn't resist ordering it. The top and the bottom of the pineapple are slightly different shades of gold but it quite like it that. Unfortunately I can't find it online anymore but if it does come back into stock it was £7.99 and it actually a decent size so it's well worth the money.

Sticking with the pineapple theme my last H&M buy is also associated with this tasty tropical treat. This first appeared on the website quite a few months ago but it disappeared pretty much straight away and I thought I'd missed out. Thankfully it's now back in stock so I snapped it up as quickly as I could.

Quite a bit smaller than it's sparkly gold cousin, this white ceramic pineapple is actually a candle. With a removable lid, the bottom half of the pineapple contains a unscented candle. I'm not that bothered about the candle so I'm trying to think of a way to remove the wax without lighting it, so I an use it as a trinket box. This is £4.99 and it's currently available on the website.

My final purchase just for me was a cushion. Yes my cushion obsession strikes again and it's another blogger that's to blame. I'll let her off this time because I really do like it x Recently a lovely north east blogger Katie (follow her here if you haven't already) appeared on a local news programme, and in the background there was a fleeting glimpse of a cushion on her bed.

Loving cushions like I do, I tweeted her and asked her where it was from and the answer was Tesco. Needing it then and there I didn't want to take the risk of trailing up to my local Tesco Express so I had a look online and there it was, and it was in the sale for just £6. Unfortunately it's sold out online now but it's definitely worth having a look in a larger store if you're interested.

It's just a plain white cotton style cushion, with a black trim, a pink frame print and the words "Be Your Own Kind Of Beautiful" in black. The words are so poignant and so, so very true. Words can really hurt and I've been told all my life by idiots that I'm ugly because of my facial paralysis and whilst I'm never going to be conventionally beautiful (is anyone?), my imperfections make me who I am, in fact at one point I debated changing my blog name to Imperfect Beauty to reflect the real me.
At the risk of sounding big headed, I am beautiful inside and out, I'm a good person and so what if my face is a bit lop sided, and my tummy is a bit bigger than a supermodels, we should accept people, their flaws, and their quirks as a given.

Argh that got a bit heavy didn't it, never mind for a bit of light relief though you can watch this little video that I made to show you all of the items in this haul x Don't forget to subscribe to my You Tube channel if you haven't already x



There is one little item that I didn't feature in the video because it's something that me and Mummy Lou paid for together. I don't want to go into too much detail but we haven't had the best of times lately. I'm not really going to put too much on the blog if I can help it but be all means keep an eye on my twitter (I'm @LouLou699) if you want to keep up to date. We're both feeling a little fragile though and for us candles are a nice way to relax so we decided to treat ourselves to this Yankee Candle gift set.

The Cafe Culture collection from Yankee Candles contains some of the nicest fragrances that they've released in a long time. Whilst we both enjoy floral fragrances and I don't mind fresh scents on occasions, our real love is foodie fragrances. As the name would suggest Cafe Culture is all about the posh cafe experience. This embossed tin box contains 3 small jars that burn for around 25 - 40 hours each. The 3 fragrances are Cappuccino Truffle, which has a gorgeous creamy coffee and chocolate scent; Pain Au Raisin, a combination of buttered dough, cinnamon, and juicy brandy soaked raisins and finally Tarte Tatin, a combination of apple, sugar, spices, and buttery pastry. We got the set from this seller at Amazon and it was just £14.99 including postage x

Yummy we haven't burnt them yet but the smell when you open the tin is incredible. The intention was to buy the small jars, to help us decide which of the larger jars to buy, but at this rate I can see us buying all 3. I love my Yankee Candles and I'm really looking forward to seeing some more yummy scents in the upcoming Christmas collections.

So that was my mini home haul and a bit of an emotional outpouring all in one x Gotta love hormones haven't you ;) Thanks for reading, don't forget to watch the video and if you have any questions please let me know xx