In September it’ll be FIVE YEARS since I agreed to buy my little home off a new build plan. I can’t believe how quickly it’s gone; it feels like only yesterday I was wearing a hardhat on a building site trying to imagine what my kitchen would look like. As we look forward towards the future, we’ve talked about letting go of our beautiful home and upgrading to something bigger to accommodate our future goals and aspirations.
The thought of ever leaving this 2 bedroom house breaks my heart because I worked SO hard to purchase and furnish it on my own when I was 23. Scanning the market, we have an idea on what type of property our next move might be. We’re not going anywhere soon… so until then, we’ve decided to make some tweaks to the house so we can squeeze a couple more years out of it so that when we eventually do move we’ll have a bigger budget. This, coupled with the fact, I’m not ready to say goodbye just yet.
Lounge
I spend the majority of my time in the lounge when I’m at home – it’s my favourite room in the house. Last year we shuffled the furniture around which made the room feel bigger, and it feels much more social when we have guests over. I’m really glad we did it because the rooms so much better this way.
We’ve recently inherited a bigger television and cleared out the cupboard under the stairs (such a relief!). We’ve moved our large grey DFS armchair back to the bedroom and replaced it with a gigantic fur beanbag.
It’s the comfiest thing in the world, not to mention the room weirdly feels BIGGER having it in here. Hanging behind it on the wall is a stunning Moroccan rug that I picked up in Marrakech on my hen do last month.
Kitchen
Our house isn’t big but we’re lucky that we’ve got a decent size kitchen that opens onto decking with stairs into a garden, giving the illusion of space. The illusion of space isn’t much good in reality though…
We can comfortably get a dining table and chairs in our kitchen and there’s enough room for us to both cook in there, but it was limiting. We couldn’t put in a dishwasher because there wasn’t enough under-counter space.
We stuck a condenser tumble dryer in the corner of the room, plumbed our washing machine in under the sink and cleaned our dishes by hand – not the end of the world.
Someone then gave us the idea to convert our downstairs bathroom into a utility room, freeing up space in our kitchen for a dishwasher and space where the tumble dryer was stuck in the corner of the room behind the dining table. Considering we don’t even use our downstairs bathroom, this seemed like a genius idea.
⬆ The rug is a new addition, too! I picked this beauty up when I went to Jordan in December with my best friend (another blog post I NEED to write). It’s handmade by the local Jordanians near Petra.
We picked up a cheap dishwasher, called a plumber, and a couple of hundred quid later we had a utility room, one less bathroom to clean and a lot more space! The best bit was, we don’t have to spend our evening scrubbing dishes. I can’t believe we didn’t think of this before.
It’s so much better being able to keep our laundry basket, bin and other cleaning products tucked away in a cupboard. We managed to keep our sink in there, too which is good for when we need to empty the water tank from the tumble dryer. It’s not particularly beautiful but it makes life way easier.
Bathroom
We’ve lost one of our toilets but honestly, we never used it! It was so small and we have a family bathroom upstairs, so we always used that one anyway. One less room to buy flowers for, too…
There’s only so much you can do when decorating a bathroom, especially when you just like everything to be white, like me! We bought a new bin, some fancy new soaps and got a bath caddy. But the most exciting thing is actually very sad… We finally got our heated towel rail fitted and I’m so happy.
We bought it literally two years ago and never got around to having it plumbed in. TA-DA! 👇
When the plumber came over to sort out the utility room, we got him to pop the radiator in too. It looks so much nicer than before and it’s a much better use of space. Goodbye towels hanging on the landing.
Overall, it doesn’t look much different in the bathroom because I try and keep it clear from bottles etc. We do have some new scales that sync up to your phone and track your weight, which is pretty cool!
Bedroom
We’ve made some small changes to the bedroom but nothing major. Our bedroom has a large G-Plan sideboard at the end of the room opposite the bed with 2 matching bedside tables. I love midcentury furniture and would probably decorate the entire house with it if I could afford to. Watch this space… 👀
I’d been on the hunt for some artwork to go above the bed for a little while. We don’t have a headboard and I didn’t really want one. Instead, I wanted a statement piece. That exactly what I found when I came across this beach oil painting print. I couldn’t resist it, and it looks so beautiful with our bamboo lampshade.
The print has a hint of pink in and we’ve got a lovely new (to us) vintage pink ottoman, which compliments our pink and grey contrast bedcovers nicely. The DFS chair being in the bedroom works really nicely with the grey already in the room, too. Happy accidents and all that.
Midcentury teak and bamboo probably don’t go together but I’m totally in love with how it looks – even S is impressed with the pink. We’re currently working on the office and I’m so excited to share it with you xxx