My (future) amazing kitchen.

We love cooking at home but our kitchen is, with the loft, the room that will require most work in the flat. The appliance are old and the design very boring. We need to turn this kitchen for students (that we are not) into something practical, stylish and with lots of storage space.

Ladies and gentlemen, our kitchen.

Our 3 challenges to build our amazing kitchen
1) It is a narrow rectangle-shaped space that stretches along the living-room. J's plan is to take the wall down and create a kitchen bar. I am not a hundred percent sold on this idea as I like to cook in a "real" kitchen. For me, each room should have its own atmosphere, noises and smells. But J seems to be so keen to do it that I have started thinking about a nice way to make this happen. Something important to take into consideration - our kitchen floor is about 6 inches lower than the living-rooms'.
2) We need to properly design everything inside the kitchen itself from the cupboards, to the appliance and wall colors.
3) Leave room for recycling.
And secret challenge 4) Tell J to buy one knife, not five, and get rid of most the stuff he has been keeping in his kitchen since his student years.

As always I am looking for a creative way to sort out all my problems. I don't want to buy an already-designed kitchen and make it fit in this narrow space. We must really think ahead and, again, think bespoke.

Here are some kitchen bar ideas I found on this great American website, Pure Kitchen.

Ideas to keep in mind:
- wooden panel in the first picture.
- bookcase in the second picture

Eco-friendly baby room

Our daughter will be 5-month old when we move in our flat and I want to make her room as sustainable as we can afford.

This is the list of items I need to get hold of asap:

- Cot - ideally one of these convertible ones that can last a few years
- A good mattress that my daughter could use for another 2-3 years at least.
- Changing Table
- Baby closet

The bed, and especially its mattress, is the one thing I really want to get right. After all, our babies sleep 15 to 20 hours a day - well, other babies do I guess. I read on a French childcare website that organic mattresses were becoming more and more in vogue for babies. This is great news but where can I find them in England?

I just discovered The Little Green Sheep which seems to have some affordable products for the everyday life. Their beds however are overpriced for my £250 budget. It's okay as I am confident I can find the sort of baby bed I'm after for that price in a big shop like Mother Care.

What really caught my eye on their website is the mattresses section.

Each cot and cot bed custom mattress contains four main materials; coconut fibre bound with natural latex, organic Welsh wool and organic cotton. Each material combines to provide your baby with a firm, supportive mattress. The coconut fibre ensures that the cot mattress retains its long-lasting support and firmness for up to 5 years.

All mattresses are hand-made. Just send in your measurements and this Worcester-based company can deliver to your door within 10 working days. They even sell an organic travel cot mattress...

If you are looking for more organic products for the everyday life, have a look at the Becothing website. They started as a company with their now famous becohangers - which I would happily use in my baby closet if I hadn't already started polluting it with the ugly plastic hangers I got in France. For toddlers, they now sell eco-friendly potties and suggests that you recycle them as flower pots in your garden once your child is done with them. Clever ey?

For more eco-friendly baby products in the UK check out babipur for their beautiful wooden toys (free delivery in the UK throughout July), The Organic Baby Compagny, Green Baby where I found some organic sleeping bags for babies on sale (much cheaper than anywhere else), Spirit of Nature.

It is definitely worth looking for the organic alternative to pretty much anything we need these days. Prices for eco-friendly furniture are higher than what we can find in less sustainable shops. But smaller things are definitely getting more and more affordable.

Remember to always investigate the origin of the things you buy. It's not because it's organic that it's sustainable.