Since I bought my little flat last year I’ve had a little obsession with all things interior design. The minute we started looking for our own place I started annoying Chris with clippings from home magazines, and by the time the sale had gone through, I had a whole Pinterest board full of ideas of how I wanted to decorate. Ask me anything about colour schemes, or decorating trends, I am quite the expert now. Last year just after the offer on my flat had been accepted I visited the Ideal Home Show and I picked up a few ideas, but this year now that I was fully moved in and able to act on my decorating dreams, I was looking forward to visiting again.
The Ideal Home Show is based at the Olympia London and was on from the 18th March until the 3rd of April, giving you three weeks of all things lovely and homey to look at. I took my friend Jen along with me, mostly to give Chris a break from looking at again more decorating ideas, but also because she shares my love of scatter cushions and kitchen gadgets. We set off early to have a full day of looking around the show, and got there just after it opened. I’m glad we did because just after lunch time everyone else seemed to have the same idea to come and visit, but luckily we’d made our way around most of it by then.
My favourite part about the show is the show homes, so we headed to them first before the ques to look around got too busy. They had one that was meant to be a ‘green’ house, made up of individual modules that had been hand crafted from natural and low impact building materials. While I didn’t know much about making houses greener, or what they are made from, I enjoyed walking around and looking at how it was decorated.
There were also other ‘rooms’ around the show that you could look into for decoration ideas, and there was one bathroom that had the most beautiful bath which I’m gutted I can’t recreate in my tiny flat’s bathroom. I loved looking at fully completed rooms, and they can give you some great ideas for how to use different colour schemes or how to accessorise your room.
What I thought was one of the best parts of the show is upstairs there is a whole section dedicated to food. When it came to what we wanted to eat for lunch we had so many options, in the end I picked up a burger and some churros, but it was a pretty difficult decision to make. Another fun part was on the British Gas Stand you could get a photo taken with their mascot Wilbur, and who doesn’t love photos with adorable penguins?!
Even though I didn’t buy anything it was still a fantastic day out, and I got to meet Wilbur! I’m sure I’ll be heading there again next year, and hopefully one day I’ll have a house with even more room to decorate in!
*British Gas provided me for free tickets for the Ideal Home Show
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