The long road ahead...

We bought our first house last August. We knew it would take some time to decorate it to our taste/standards but hey, that was half the fun, right!?! Well, thats what we thought but no-one could have prepared us for the actual house of horrors we moved into! Everything looked ok on the surface when we viewed the property. Where the bricks and mortar are still good, from day one, slowly but surely it seems that everything is falling down round our ears.

It turns our the previous owner was a major DIY disaster, everything he has either installed/fitted/plumbed/touched has in turn either broke/fell off/flooded/exploded, a flaming nightmare.........and bloody dangerous!!! Word of advice, if you can't 'Do It Yourself' then DON'T!!!!

So the long and short of it is, where we thought our lovely new house was going to be a light refurb job, it now looks like we are going to have to (short of the roof) replace everything!! Which means that all our money is being eaten up by boring (but essential) stuff like boilers and the fun decorating stuff will just have to wait a while (a long while). Oh well, if a job is worth doing...

A new kitchen is a long way off but we have sort of finished a couple of rooms and we are really chuffed with how they've turned out. I have posted some Before and After images below, and when I look at them I realise how much we have actually achieved, and how lucky I am. As everyone keeps telling me, 'Rome wasn't built in a day' and I know its true!

Before...

Artex - one word - 'why?' Who invented the stuff? Its flaming awful and 

impossible to get off. John, our wee grafter here trying to sand the livingroom ceiling.

And after...

I’ve Included some festive pics in here too, I know Christmas seems like a distant memory but in our old flat we didn’t have enough room for a tree so this year we went to town and bought an eight-footer!! Our first ever real tree. We even got a mini spruce for the kitchen and why not, we now have 3 times the amount of space that we had in the old place and I was determined to fill as much of it as I could with all beautiful  decorations that I couldn’t buy before!