My life in pictures #3

On 13 July 2012, DC and I received the keys for our very first home. Our dream home. Yay! This seems fitting for today's post as I can't quite believe it was 8 months ago today that we were stood outside our new house in a brand new village waiting for the previous owners to move out of the house that was legally ours. It was a GREAT feeling.

We didn't dare to view this house for a long time because I knew I'd fall in love with it, and it was too expensive. But we had been saving hard for 7 months by this point and had spent about a month looking at houses with no luck, so we were starting to get a bit fed up (living on £20/week made me into a biatch).

We finally went to view it, fell in love with it, and put in a cheeky offer of £15k less than the inflated asking price (they were asking A LOT compared to neighbouring houses). It took so much wrangling and negotiating until they finally accepted our offer, £11k short of the asking price.

After our offer was accepted, it only actually took 7 weeks for the house to go through. It went so fast and then all of a sudden it was ours!

We soon realised that it is only after you've moved into a house that you really see all of the work that actually needs doing. For a start, the house was FILTHY. It didn't look so much from a distance, but we had to use a tonne of bleach on the shower and the kitchen to get it all gleaming.

We didn't have an awful lot of money to spend on the house, after spending so much on the deposit and fees that mounted up by the time of completion. I think we had about £3k. We started by getting the artex ceilings in every room plastered over, and then we bought some new flooring to go down in the lounge which was much smarter looking.

 

It gave my Dad and DC some bonding time too! It was funny that they were really struggling to lay the floor down properly and had to keep pulling it back up again... THEN they read the instructions and found out how to lay it properly, and it went down in minutes. Men....

When we began to paint, we started to get a picture of how our lounge would end up looking. As soon as the paint was on, all of those midnight finishes before driving back home and getting up at 6 for work seemed worth it (we left it two weeks after the keys to move in).

For some reason, it looked as though our owners had a soft spot for lime green...

 

And this was the first to go!

We decided that our master bedroom would be the one the old owner's child had before. This is what we had to contend with...

Nightmare! It took two coats of white base paint to cover the colour, plus two coats of our Earl Grey to make it look respectable.

But we were more than happy once it was finished.

We ordered laminate flooring for the downstairs bathroom and kitchen, and the place went bust. ANOTHER NIGHTMARE. But once again, once it was down we were really happy.

When DC told me that he wanted a dining table that had benches, I was unimpressed. But there had been a few ideas that DC had proposed - changing the lounge flooring for one - that I wasn't keen on in the beginning but they were some of the best decisions we ever made. So we bought this Argos dining table and benches, which was luckily half price at the time at £150 - bargain! - and kept it in our garage until it was ready to come out.

Again, DC wins because once it was up I LOVED it.

We knew that the sofas were going to take six weeks to arrive and we made do with an old sofa until then. When they finally came they looked AMAZING. I suppose you can never tell how they're going to look in your lounge and we were keeping everything crossed that they would match our colour scheme.

Obviously all of this was hard work for DC!

Then it was time for decorations, to make it finally feel like a home.

 

The only thing the lounge is missing now are some shelves that we'd like above the TV, and some blinds in our bay window. It's taken a long time to get the lounge completed; you don't realise how expensive lamps and curtains and candles are! But now we're finally ready to move onto a new room and get our bedroom looking the way we want it.

We painted our small spare bedroom the the other day, and now it looks fab with my gorgeous dressing table that DC surprised me with for my birthday in August.

We've worked so hard for the past eight months to make our house into a home but we really couldn't have done it without all of our friends and family who have come around and painted, DIY'd, and treated us to things that we couldn't afford - we wouldn't have had the oven, washing machine or fire if it wasn't for our parents!

It's still a work in progress but I'm so proud to say that I've bought my own house and I love the feeling of coming home to it every evening, to the peace and quiet, knowing that it is YOURS and you don't have to let anyone in if you don't want to! You can just ignore the door and phone - it's brilliant!

One thing is for certain though, I'm hoping DC does not want to move house for another 40 years because I'm not going through this all again in a hurry!

Dans