Starting from scratch with colour

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?

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Tiled bathroom in the showhome

How we chose bathroom wall tiles

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.

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How to choose a kitchen for a new build

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.

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The roaring twenties

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.

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