We got back last weekend from an amazing week travelling around Cornwall in a vintage VW camper van. I'll do a blogpost on that soon but first I'd love to tell you about our stay at The Pig near Bath where we stopped off for a night on our way home for a bit of luxury after a week of campsites.

Ben and I never know what to buy each other for Christmas so for the past few years we've decided to go away instead just after New Year. It's lovely to start the year off with a trip and prices are normally low in January so you can stay in gorgeous places for a fraction of the price they would be in high season. So around the end of summer I set about looking for a cosy cottage in the UK to book. Given that our winter's are either freezing cold or soaking wet, I try to find somewhere that we would want to spend time in cosying up, it must have a log burner and ideally a roll top bath (hence the name of this blog). I think when you've spent a lot of time and effort choosing interiors for your own home, going away should never be a step down from where you live. Some people take the attitude that they won't spend a lot of time in accommodation whereas for me having a nice place to go back to at the end of the day makes a holiday extra special. Finding a boutique gorgeous hotel can be fairly easy but finding a boutique gorgeous cottage is not. A lot of the holiday cottages for rent online are pretty shocking and basic, some perfectly adequate but if you really dig around you can find some that are pretty special.

Welcome to the Makeover Monday series. After living in London for a couple of years, we decided to move back out to a village in Hertfordshire where we both grew up and where all of our family and friends are based. London was fun for a while but we craved more space, a garden and fresh air. It was also a bonus that the further outside of London you go the more you get for your money. We got a three bedroom house with a garden in our favourite village for less than the price of our one bedroom teeny tiny Maida Vale flat. We were thrilled to secure a victorian terrace after a scary time of submitting a sealed bid the day before we were going on holiday for two weeks. But in October 2012 we got the keys!! The house needed a fair bit of work. It was all perfectly habitable but we set about it as our project and loved gathering inspiration from Pinterest and magazines and then finding bits of furniture or our bath on ebay, driving half way around the country to pick up our bargain finds and doing them up for our new home. Ben did 90% of the work on the house, an incredible transformation. We got featured in Ideal Home magazine this June, which I will post about soon. But first up is the bathroom transformation -