This was supposed to be an easy housemove. Just us, the builder and our buyer in the chain. I have no doubt that waking up at three, four, five, and not being able to get back to sleep is par for the course with a standard move… And then there’s this.
It can be a bit daunting knowing what to do with a new build when it comes to colour. You’re handed a house that’s blindingly white or magnolia and it inevitably stays like that, at least for a bit, while you have more pressing things to do. And before long, maybe you fail to see it any more or perhaps it seems like too huge a task because once you start, isn’t that you committed to painting every surface in the entire house? How do you see the potential past those blank walls?
Bathroom tiles have literally been the only thing we’ve had an argument about throughout the whole process so far… and I think it’s because I wasn’t being decisive enough. I went to the sales office one evening in late November, still thinking we had a month or two to make our choices, and took a picture of every single tile option, in very poor light.
Normally I make decisions quickly and Barry tends to just agree because I make good aesthetic choices/he can’t be bothered arguing – delete as applicable. We got a call the day after I took the pictures to say we needed to come in to make our choices pretty much immediately. We were then working from the pictures, and these tiles were all white, ivory, cream, beige or grey, it was like snow blindness.
Every house builder has a range of kitchens to choose from. Sometimes you get a house where they’ve already put the basic option in to meet their own timescales, sometimes a sale has fallen through and you get someone else’s choices, and if you’re early enough in the sales process, you get to choose your own.
We’ve lived here over three and a half years, all the while intending to get a new kitchen fitted, and it’s never happened… which meant that when we had the opportunity to choose our own for this one, we went all out.
The house we’re buying is a step up from our current one in terms of space, but not character, so we need to do some work to inject that ourselves.
This is the floor plan for the new house…
This won’t come as a surprise to you if you follow my Instagram, but if you don’t, hang onto your hat, for we are on the move again. I know our current house had all the hallmarks of being our Forever Home (capital F, capital H), but we have a (laminated) pros and cons list that led us to this decision. We had to actually write them down after every conversation started with a counterargument to the previous one and we stopped talking about anything but.
I’m writing this one as I found no help online to achieve this – I wanted to paint a rainbow in Scarlett’s room that started on one wall, travelled over her door onto the ceiling, came down an eaved part of the ceiling, and then came down the adjacent wall.
I get these ideas in my head sometimes that I can’t get out. Things that aren’t actually that practical or even feasible, but I want to do them anyway because I think they’ll be amazing if they work. SPOILER ALERT: this worked. It’s in the header image right there.
Well, we’ve had grand plans for the house this year and have done very little (ahem, again). I realise it’s only August, but seeing as we’re wanting to start from the outside in and just spent all of that money on the roof, it doesn’t seem like we’ll be able to start until next year.
We’ve realised we had everything back to front – wanting to start with a kitchen re-fit before the flooring for all of downstairs doesn’t make sense… nor does doing anything major inside before we get rid of all of those annoying bits of gravel that get walked in incessantly.
SO <bangs gavel>. The order right now is…
I’m trying really hard to think of a way I can get a yellow sofa into the new kitchen without it being absolutely destroyed by Jude… still thinking on that one!
In an ideal world, I would like a buttery yellow, plump Chesterfield-style sofa in something soft, like velvet. It would be deep but supportive, and have big arms to lean against when I’m reading.
Short post today – I should have set this up ages ago, but the blog now has its very own Instagram account, whaaaaaaaat? I can upload photos far more often than I get time to sit down and blog, so get over there, Instachums.