Lifestyle

Finding and Making a Home

living room

If you follow me on Pinterest, which you should as I’ve some awesome Pinterest boards, you may have noticed that I’ve been going a little interiors-crazy pinning lately. And that’s mostly because we’ve been house-hunting since August of last year. We’ve put countless offers in on places and have seen every home in our budget from Hull to Hebden Bridge. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that we’ve seen dozens of houses right now.

Our budget is mostly in the “fixer-up” price bracket, which we’ve always known. We’ve also always known that we’d be spending most of our savings on a deposit so any fixing up that needed doing would have to wait a few years. So any disgusting or out-of-date kitchens we’d just have to live with. But we’re perfectly happy with that. It’s potentially going to be a forever home so we have ages to make the changes we need, and as we’ve lived in mouldy, falling apart rental places for our whole relationship (and I mean falling apart – in our flat in Crystal Palace, one whole wall separated away from the rest of the building and a structural engineer wanted to evacuate everyone from the building, but the rental company was like “nah, it’ll be okay.”) So if we have to have a mildewy bathroom for a few years – but it’s our mildewy bathroom – then I’m okay with that.

But I’ve definitely identified some key areas in all of these houses that need to change. It’s usually kitchens, bathrooms, old carpet and either awful wallpaper and/or terrible paint colours.

We actually had an offer accepted on a place at the end of November, and 3 months on there’s still no exchange date in sight (all being well – there’s still 100 million different ways everything could fall through. Stupid England and its insane house-buying system). I don’t want to say where, what type of property and even really think about being a home-owner because I don’t want to jinx the whole thing. But that hasn’t stopped me from dreaming about what we’d need to do to it.

Finding and Making a Home

Major Changes 

As I’ve already mentioned, it would definitely need a new kitchen and bathroom. But the house hasn’t been damp-proofed ever? So that would be the most serious concern that we’d have to remedy before we even moved in. The kitchen and bathroom can wait for years to come.

The carpet upstairs would need to be pulled up as it’s in awful condition. (However, I sneakily pulled it up in one corner to see what was underneath and the original floorboards are still there. Fingers crossed about their condition.) In one room there is that weird, foamy tile in the ceiling, which I’m pretty sure you aren’t allowed to install in houses any more as it’s a fire hazard. So that would need to come out.

Also the whole house is wallpapered. And not even in an interesting pattern or a weird, dated, period print. No. It’s wallpapered in plain magnolia in some rooms, yellow in others. My worst nightmare. We’d have to strip all of that off and re-paint.

Other, super long-term projects would be to get the fireplace working and/or install a wood-burner. Replace the grubby laminate flooring in the sitting room with real wood again, knock down the wall between the kitchen and the sitting room, and convert the loft into a room. I told you I was talking life-time long-term plans. A girl can dream right?


Accessories

A keystone to a warm and inviting home, for me, is scent. I always find it off-putting when you move into a new place and it doesn’t smell like “you”. When we first moved to York, I think it took a good two weeks for the house to adapt to us. So I love to push it a little and light as many candles as possible. On a day to day basis, I like to have reed diffusers in every room and I’ve been saving up for a proper aromatherapy diffuser for awhile. (It’s not the diffuser that’s really expensive, but the essential oils that go with it.)

And whilst I love amazing smells, I’m quite sensitive. Even walking through the perfume hall at Selfridge’s gives me a headache for the rest of the day. So I’m quite picky about what candles and smells I do have in the house. Neom Organics is a personal favourite of mine. I find most of their scents to be perfect for the home; very relaxing and promoting of calmness. (Their Complete Bliss and Tranquility lines is especially good for that!) Plus I love that Neom products are made in the UK, ethically sourced, with only natural and organic ingredients.

I also really love that it’s a Yorkshire-based brand! Neom was founded in Harrogate 11 years ago, and has rapidly expanded. One of my favourite bloggers Kat Got the Cream interviewed Nicola, the founder of Neom, last year, and it’s a really interesting post to read.

The other accessory that I’d really like to get for our new places is some sort of gorgeous rug for the sitting room. We have a beautiful one at the moment, but with its pristine black and white pattern and a puppy, we’ve had to roll it up and move it upstairs. I’ve actually really disliked not having any rugs downstairs. We can easily find something that would hide stains a bit easier, but since we’ve been house-hunting for ages we haven’t wanted to buy anything without knowing the dimensions of any rooms first.

And last but not least, more plants. Always more plants. I’d particularly like some really large ones.


Furniture 

I’ll be frank, I have fairly basic and annoying taste in mid-century modern design with a Scandi twist. In terms of furniture, we’re actually pretty set! There are a few things that I’d like to change and upgrade – I’d especially like some sort of chunky, really solid (preferably one piece, not slated) reclaimed wood dining table. But for it to not cost a fortune. That’s not too much to ask, right?

I also really hate our bed-frame at the moment, and I’m not even planning on taking it with us if and when we move. I’d rather have our mattress on the floor. Sam and I have agreed on what sort of frame that we want and we might even build it ourselves. We’ve decided that we don’t really like any bed posts or even the smallest of headboards – that it’s not really us, so watch this space for that one day.

I’ve also been thinking about upgrading our sofa – eventually, of course. Our current one is definitely serviceable but with it’s cloth fabric there’s a tendency for it to just soak everything up, and very easily look grubby (I guess you can tell that a lot of cups of tea have been spilt on our sofa.) I really want a sofa that we can wipe down (that doesn’t sound very appealing when I phrase it that way!) but a nice leather sofa would be perfect, I think. I have my eye on some of the gorgeous pieces from Cox & Cox.

Now I just need to convince Sam as he’s lived in houses with leather sofas before and he dislikes them. But the benefit over time would be a positive one, I think. Poor little Harold had a few accidents on the sofa when he was a pupper and once, he was sick on the sofa (caused by his extra quick eating, I think) and it would be such a relief to be able to scrub the sofa then and there instead of having to take the cushion covers off, wash them, dry clean the cushions, wait for everything to dry and then re-assemble it. Once we weren’t able to sit on our sofa for a full weekend because that whole process was taking so long!


Outside

There’s not a whole lot of outside space, and what there is is all concrete, but it would be nice to get a few raised beds, some plants and a table and chairs outside. Harold would have a smidge more room to run around in outside then he does now and that would be awesome!


Phew! If you’ve made it this far into the post, well done you! Even though I’ve just wasted all this space writing about a house, I’m not getting my hopes up because we’ve been disappointed so many times on this journey. Fortunately, the changes that I’ve written about here would be applicable to anywhere we move, so I’d only have to adjust my vision slightly, so this is fairly universal for me.

If anyone has an extra house or flat kicking about and just wants to give it to me, I promise I’d make it look beautiful!

***This post was in collaboration with a brand, but all opinions are forever my own***

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