Home Sweet Home

March is here & has brought with it a whole lot of spring cleaning!  First up was helping my friend clean her newly purchased house.  It’s the first step on the property ladder for her & her fiance & has been a bit of battle to get to this point so I was very pleased to be able to offer my services & help out.  One full day of vacuuming, dusting & scrubbing later and we left a nice clean shiny house ready to be filled with all their belongings.  I wish them both lots of love & luck for their new home.

Our house has been getting the Spring Clean treatment too.  The vacuum cleaner has worked it's rollers off in the past couple of weeks & my elbows are running low on grease but it is worth it as the house feeling fresh and looking sparkly! 

In many parts of the house a spring clean is just not enough.  We have lived here for over 4 years (and Husband was here a fair while before I turned up) but we have been a bit slack in the whole decorating/renovating department & have mostly just made do with what we had.  We have been planning what we want for ages & Husband did a grand job before the wedding planning started by decorating the living room, dining room & bathroom but then we got engaged and kind of just, stopped. 

Money was a big factor in this as anyone who has got married recently, or who is planning a wedding, will tell you weddings don’t come cheap.  They also take a lot of TIME.  So, no money & no time meant no changes to our house. 

Well, the wedding was a year ago & since then we have put our time (and our money!) to finally making our house into our home. 

We have put up photos (can you believe we didn't have a single photo up anywhere in the house?  Not one.)  We now have a lot of photos up.  An entire wall of them, all in black & white, in our dining room for starters.  Filled with memories from holidays, day trips, walks, time with friends, our wedding, our honeymoon.  It's lovely to have a space that is entirely unique to us.  And it's a great conversation starter!

Yes, that is an empty frame; we are still
umming & ahhing about what pic to use!

We have replaced the hand-me-down furniture. We are putting up shelving in the dining room. This last weekend we gutted the front bedroom taking out all grey 80’s fitted furniture & the grey swirly carpet & the grey venetian blind (seriously – it was like living in a rain cloud!)

Rain Cloud Bedroom in the morning

Gutted Bedroom in the evening!

My favourite change is our new kitchen.  I love to cook.  I have a ridiculous cookbook collection; I can’t walk past a book shop without at least browsing the cookbooks.  I have a huge collection of Good Food & Delicious magazines going back to 2006.  I have said before about how much I love to bake.  So having a kitchen that I designed, that is mine is so amazing.  We have so much storage, loads of work surface, a big five ring gas hob & an oven that actually cooks at the temperature it says it is!  I love our kitchen!  It’s not quite finished; we want to change the lights & add some more decorative bits & bobs but that will come.  For now we are just enjoying have a room that feels very much like the heart home now.

The new heart of our home

Apologies for the poor quality photos; I will endeavour to get some better ones as we progress through the rooms.