Doing Up A New (ish) Build!

Doing up a new (ish) build sounds funny, why would it need it? But let me explain. Our house is ten years old (again ish) so it’s not got masses of its own inbuilt character like say a Victorian terrace with ceiling roses and other original Victorian features. The original features in our house are spot lights and USB ports. We are the second owners and when we moved in it still all felt very naked and a little bit soulless. Magnolia walls and flooring that wasn’t anything but also not quite finished.

And we knew straight away that we wanted it to be different but we didn’t really know how so we decided to do things very slowly and take our time. We would leave it soulless (albeit with white walls rather than the dreaded magnolia which always just looks like nicotine stained white to me) and the do each room at a time when inspiration took us. Jonny wanted to go out and buy artwork to get on the walls but I’ve made him wait until we found perfect pieces and I think we did well with that as now our kitchen is the home to a giant crab we love so much, our photo wall up to the loft floor is exactly how I wanted it and the WW2 map of England on our living room wall looks fab in there. Less haste and more care that’s what we have employed in our attitude and I think our house, thought no where near finished, is coming along nicely!

Flooring is where it’s at and after we sorted out our boot room, which had bizarrely been laid with mostly sand stone tiles bar a circumference around it which was a head scratcher as to how to fix (we put coconut matting all around and it looks like it was meant to be somehow and thank goodness) we concentrated on everywhere else. I like wooden flooring, it’s just SO easy to keep clean and looks streamlined so having already got some down stairs we put in some engineered wood flooring upstairs too and it looks beaut!

We’ve got it in all 3 upstairs bathrooms, the guest bedroom, Florence’s room and all throughout in the loft now which looks perfect. I love how it makes the rooms look bigger, I adore that a quick sweep and everything is clean as a whistle and most of all it’s perfect for having children around because if (ha, as if it’s just an IF) something gets spilled it really doesn’t matter as it cleans right up instantly!

So we’ve done the floors, we’ve done the walls, some art work is on display… Now I am concentrating on specific areas like the downstairs cloakroom which was a labour of love covering a dark green paint one day in lockdown. I have added the touches that tiny room needed to make it sing – A terribly pretentiously named Farrow and Ball light grey (I mean let’s call a spade a spade here right?!) on the panelling, white on the walls and a darker grey on the built in wooden shelf with the same on the wooden accents. A plant (except it isn’t real as there is no natural light but you would never know), our lovely port hole mirrir, some fun books and nice soaps and candles have made it what I wanted (flooring aside) and I want to work some of that magic upstairs too. My dressing room needs a colour, dark I think, on one wall. It needs gold to pop and hooks to hang jewellery and shelves for shoes and I was thinking of hanging beautiful dresses like art!

Watch this space!