They say it’s one of the most stressful things you can do, but 2013 is set to be a year of change, decorating and more work on a house, as we’re about to up sticks and move.
Aside from the fact that we’re currently in pre-moving chaos and mega last minute de-cluttering (we move next week…eek), we’re looking forward to settling in and getting stuck into improving another house. The idea of gradually adding decor, new colour schemes, curtains and soft furnishings does, not surprisingly, rather appeal to me!
We’ve loved living in our current house and have done loads to it over the last six and a half years, thanks in part to finding some excellent builders, including a kitchen extension and re-fit, a bathroom re-fit and re-design, complete new fencing outside, new soffits and gutters, changing all the internal doors, decorating the hall and stairs, creating a lovely patio with contemporary glass panelling, and a lot of planting in the garden.
We will miss the garden as it’s rather quirky, and one of the compromises with the new house is a smaller garden – but on the plus side, it’s nearly a complete blank canvas, so we are looking forward to designing and planting it in the way we want it.
The hardest part is leaving the kitchen. It wasn’t that stunning when we first moved in – very small and a complete ‘shrine to pine’ – even the ceiling was clad with pine. But we were able to knock down a wall and extend it, creating a much bigger, more functional kitchen and breakfast room.
It originally looked like this:
In progress looked like this:
And was finally transformed into this:
The kitchen in the new house is an original, somewhat retro kitchen, so at some point it’s going to be subject to another kitchen re-fit once we’ve moved in. It’s a reasonably good sized room, but there is scope to expand it – we’re currently debating whether to knock a wall down and create a large kitchen diner, to put a door through to the existing dining room or simply re-design and update the layout, adding lots more storage.
However, we’re going to have to live with it for a while and see how the space and layout functions, as the house as a whole is in need of a good dose of TLC and there’s a long list of more practical and pressing DIY jobs to do first!
For now, it’s back to the packing…
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It is amazing how a little hard work and TLC can turn kitchen hell into kitchen heaven.
Love the use of mixed colour tiles under the cabinets.
Checklist method is very useful and between moving remember all those work about moving. I like your blog and really happy with your information. Thanks for sharing.
You can hire a top-rated full-service moving company to take care of all the move-related details for you, including the arduous and laborious tasks of packing and heavy furniture lifting, while you won’t even have to lift a finger, at least in most cases. That sounds too good to be true, right? Well, using full-service moving services happens to be the most expensive way to move house.