Our Current House Renovation Plans
As my boyfriend and I have shelved the conversation of moving for a little while we’re ready to make some more changes to our home. We’re not doing anything crazy or too expensive because we know we’re going to be moving in the next couple of years and have to be realistic with what adds value to the house and what is just to our taste as house renovations add up real fast. Our bathroom renovation was undoubtedly the biggest thing we took on and 8 months on we’re still so happy with the finished result and we’re hoping we’ll be just as happy with the results of all our other plans.
CARPET
One of the biggest things that needs doing in our house is replacing the carpet that is throughout downstairs (bar the kitchen) and up the stairs. At the moment it’s this horrible cream, black, grey and purple stripe and we all know how much I love a stripe but I’ve finally encountered a stipe that I don’t like. Because the pattern is so intense it has always been the main focus in the room so anything else that we put in there instantly clashes because the carpet is such a statement. The reason why we’ve kept it down for so long is because of the dogs, as we’ve had them both from puppies that meant housetraining so we didn’t want anything on the floor that we were super precious about. But now they’re both somewhat grown up we don’t need to worry about them going to the toilet inside and our only concern is a little bit of mud when it’s wet outside. We have laminate flooring all upstairs and even though they’ve both grown up with it they do slip quite a lot and as we spend so much time downstairs carpet is the kindest option for them. We’ve gone for something that’s quite hard-wearing whilst still being soft underfoot and a mid grey so it won’t show up too much dirt.
FIREPLACE MAKEOVER
In our living room, we have a working fireplace, we don’t use it too often as it can get expensive to run but it’s a lovely feature. As of right now, the colour is a little too warm for our taste and for so long I’ve just thought we had to deal with it until I fell down the deep hole of fireplace makeovers on YouTube and realised we could completely change the way it looks. Right now it’s a warm wood surround and a brownish type ceramic and I can't say I'm a fan at all. Our plans are quite simple by painting the wood surround white and we’re going to tile over the ceramic (with these tiles hopefully) and then use a heat resistant paint on the actual fireplace itself. I try and stay as far away as I can from Pinterest or YouTube when it comes to interiors as I find it way too far away from what is realistic (seriously, do people not have wires, light switches or plug sockets?) but this time it’s opened up a whole new world of ideas. Changing the colour of this area of the room will make such a huge impact as it’s the centre point and as the rest of our furniture is quite cool-toned it makes sense to make this change.
SPARE ROOM
Our spare room is technically what most people use as their living room on the rest of our street (we live in a terrace so all the houses have the same layout). But because it’s at the front of the house it can be quite noisy so we moved our living space to the back and use the front room as our spare room. Annoyingly it's the biggest room in the house but that's how the layout works for us right now and it has become a little bit of a dumping ground. Not only do we need to do a serious declutter and move some things up to the attic there a couple of cupboards that need to be redone. The lady who owned the house before us dad was a handyman (not a very good one might I add) so there a lot of things that have been so poorly done and these cupboards are one of them. I don’t know about anybody else but something we struggle a lot with is storage, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to put anything like the hoover or ironing board.
KITCHEN
If we were staying in our house for a little longer than we would ideally like to have redone the kitchen and pantry as they need updating as the current layout doesn’t work at all. But as that’s a really big renovation (and a pricey one) so to freshen that space up we’re going to repaint the kitchen itself as well as going through and sanding all the woodwork that we can as that will make a big change without spending a small fortune. A couple of years ago we pulled up the lino to see what was underneath and we were pleasantly surprised to find some dark wooden floorboards underneath which are in pretty good condition and that drastically changed the overall look of the kitchen.
General LIVING ROOM
The biggest things that we’ll be changing in the living room is the carpet and the fireplace but we will also be repainting the space too. The room has been white for years as it was the easiest colour to go for with the carpet. We’ve been meaning to paint the room for a while but just haven’t had the push to do it as we have now we’re finally switching up the carpet. I think we’re going to go with Pavillion Grey from Farrow & Ball as that is the perfect type of grey for the space. I find grey can be a tricky shade when it comes to paint as it can often be purple based but I think PG looks like the perfect in-between. Everything else in the room is quite cool toned so we don’t want to go overboard and make it feel too cold so I’m hoping this colour will balance things out a little more. As well as all our other plans the room could do with a little bit of a declutter, which will be easily done when we’re moving everything to the spare room as we’ll be able to see everything that we’ve got. And just like the rest of the house, we’ve got to sand and regloss all the skirting boards in the room, although we have discovered that using satin wood paint instead of traditional gloss is way easier.
hallway & landing
A job that we finally ticked off the list this month was resanding the bannister (are we sensing a theme with the woodwork here?) and repainting it and even though it was a boring fiddly task it has made such a big difference. Another job we need to do that is the right at the bottom of the list is repaint the hallway and landing as I have no idea how long it’s been since it was painted as we’ve not touched it. As we’re in a terrace house there is absolutely no light coming into the space so it’s quite dark so we're a fresh lick of white paint as well as the new carpet on the stairs will help brighten up the area a lot.
