It's a Green House

After lockdown, changes in our lifestyles and how we use our homes will home buying and design trends change at all? There are a few interesting articles around and YoungHouseLove also talked about it recently on their podcast.  https://www.placenorthwest.co.uk/news/designers-map-future-of-interiors-post-lockdown/ https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-coronavirus-will-change-homes-36746564 A lot of these are USA based, but lots applies in the UK too. Some of the interesting points I thought were about open plan living becoming less popular and people now wanting more defined spaces. I have never seen the appeal of open plan and would much rather have the space divided into more traditional rooms so this is something that I totally agree with. When we bought our house and knocked down some walls my dad commented that he would have actually taken down the wall between the kitchen and living room and made an L shape open plan kitchen/dining/living room. I just always would prefer to ha...

We recently got round to adding our open shelves in the kitchen (#lockdownlife) and it's made such a difference! If you are considering them it's definitely worth giving them a try. Here's what they look like, yes there is a half dead fern in the sink this has also turned into something of a plant rehab centre. When designing the kitchen we originally planned to put just one upper cabinet to the left of the window but when we saw it mocked up it just looked a bit odd out there on its own with all the other upper cabinets on the other side of the room. We also realised that we already have plenty of cabinet space plus the whole utility room so we decided that we didn't really need the cabinet space enough to justify not really liking the look of it. It's totally a personal preference, I know some people will think this looks too open and cluttered and would prefer it all cabinets but in person it's a nice light corner of an otherwise clean a...

Today we are covering the project I'm personally most proud of, I did this 100% myself and it turned out much better than expected! I bought the bars but the shelves were the bulk of the work which I  used only scrap wood and paint we already had for, so if you also have scrap wood hanging around (the renovations just seem to produce endless wood off cuts here) and are looking for things to do this could be a good lockdown project. Here's the before and after to get us started, the before photo was the day we moved in and before any work started.  Obviously the rest of the bedroom has had a lot of work done as you can see from those pictures, which is covered here , but this post is just about the functionality and fittings in the wardrobe.  Having a built in wardrobe in the UK isn't necessarily a given, so we are lucky to have a one in the master bedroom. However it wasn't really laid out to use it to its full potential so I did some work to get mo...

I've done this post as one post for both bedrooms as they haven't seen a great deal of progress since I last wrote about the bedroom here so I didn't think there was really any need to rewrite the same post about it! In fact the master bedroom still pretty much looks like it does in this post from May except that it has skirting boards now and I've done a little more work on the fitted wardrobe which I will cover in its own post. The spare room is still the same except full of random crap which doesn't have a home yet and it does not have a door on. Hey not all the rooms can look better! The plan for the spare room is to knock out the stud wall and get the room just back to a regular spare room, we might make it into a film room as I have a projector. Thinking a sofa bed in there so people can stay over, a desk would also be nice so that I can work on there rather than the sofa and we have somewhere to store pa...