It's a Green House

If you are looking for a new job chances are you will do the interview remotely over video call, so what do you need to look out for and how can you use this to your advantage? I recently had two video interviews and got the job, from my experience and the research I did beforehand here are my top tips. Firstly in most ways treat it as a regular interview, wear a suit, be on time, expect the same questions and prepare in the same ways you usually would. It felt odd but I got dressed into a suit and put make up on and everything, just to sit in the spare room.  I did keep my slippers on though. Here's the reality photo, the spare room has not been touched in the house renovation so whilst I managed to stage it to look pretty ok (of what they could see on the video!) it was basically me in a suit surrounded by chaos! Make sure that your technical set up is sound. Test the WiFi connection and video work well. If you have pets keep them out of the room and make sure everyon...

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...

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...