About the house

It’s been a long time – nearly a year! – since I shared a house update. We were dithering over whether to move for a while, but ended up doing a bit of building work earlier this year (taking down a wall in the hallway to the back door, opening up my spare/study/sewing/guest room into a bigger room) which has made the whole flat work a lot better. (Well, I have more space, so no longer have itchy feet.)

I’ll share some more pics of my new room when it’s properly finished – I’m having a ball getting all my sewing stuff nicely organised in there.

What else is new? Since we’re staying put we decided to finally upgrade the hall a bit. We joke that our flat is roughly 75% corridor – it twists and turns and takes up a lot of the square-footage, and being so high-traffic it’s looking a mess after 5 years of living here. The walls are going Farrow & Ball’s Blackened, the woodwork’s been given a bright white coat, and the carpet will be switched soon. How we get the cats to a) stay out of the way while we paint and b) not scratch the new carpet to shreds, remain up for grabs.

A minor change in the living room – we swapped the grim magnolia plastic venetian blinds that our flat came equipped with to these lovely wooden ones to match all the furniture. (Oh, and I repainted all the radiators bright white too – small upgrade but so satisfying.) The new blinds came care of Hillarys, who offered me a budget to spend in exchange for a review of the product and at-home fitting service.

The service took a little while end to end due to being able to find appointments where I was at home at the same time as my local fitter had a free spot. But it was great to have all the swatches brought into my home to try in situ, and to have a professional doing the measuring and fitting, saving all the breath-holding and hand-wringing when you go the DIY route. (I did that for the back door and managed to hang the simplest roller blind with one of the brackets inside out. Still haven’t fixed it.)

I love how they look! This wood is called Tamarind which perfectly matches all our teak-y furniture – often woods can look too yellow or ashen but this is perfect. They still let lots of light in and also give a nice warm glow to the space. Thank you, Hillarys!

Finally, current mantelpiece setup – nearly at capacity, I fear.