The first thing I want to share with you is our newly decorated living room, which I am completely in love with. In my last post I shared pictures of my living room and shared with you my reasons for our choice of decor. Since then one major change took place, and that was a definite decision to stay in this home indefinitely. As you know, moving into social housing wasn't the easiest thing for me, mainly because the house is so very tiny and I had to get rid of so many things that were meaninful to me, which, for a hoarder like myself was quite a wrench. But it was also difficult because I value character and history in a home, and these homes are really just featureless boxes, all designed to be low maintenance and identical. So many of the homes I love on instagram or Pinterest are period properties, and being bombarded with such beautiful homes so full of personality and quirkiness made me hanker for the same. Have you felt that way? Well, I moved into this house believing that it was a temporary means to an end, and that my beautiful stone cottage would one day soon become a reality. But in the past couple of years, our perspective on our home and lifestyle has changed so completely that even though a little cottage is now completely possible for us to attain, we have decided that's not what we want. Why?! I hear you cry......well, although I still love that dream of a cosy little stone building nestled on its own in a woodland somewhere, there are other things I have come to value more. Chief among them is time. If we were to move we would have to get a mortgage, which would mean hubby could no longer continue to work part time. We have come to value our time with him so much, especially while the children are so young, and we realise it's a priveledge not many people have in today's world. Living in a smaller and relatively featureless home also gives me more time as a mum because it means so much less cleaning and maintenance, honestly I cannot believe how much easier my housework routine is here. All in all, since moving we feel as if the pace of our life has slowed right down and we feel more able to savour each bit of precious time with our kids. It has also meant that for the first time in a long time, our living expenses are so low that we have spare cash to actually enjoy ourselves a little. We had our first holiday abroad in seven years this year and it was wonderful. The reason I am sharing all this is because I'm sure there are some people out there who might feel as I did, that they covet that beautiful big period property that everyone else seems to have and enjoy, but for a change I want to say that I've had every kind of home you can imagine, and can honestly say that home really is wherever your heart is. It doesn't matter what type of property you live in, you can make it feel like your dream home. I really believe that.
As we are going to be here for some time, I wanted hubby to love our sitting room as much as I do, and pink and floral is not really his style! Also, the room felt a little like we had just brought a load of mismatched furniture in and attempted to squeeze it in wherever there was space, which is actually exactly what we did! We wanted to use the limited space a little better and make it feel more co-ordinated and 'intentional' if you catch my drift. Hubby likes lots of natural materials like oak and stone, and he favours a stronger, darker palette than I do. As a compromise we chose farrow and ball 'light grey' for the walls.
I was slightly concerned it may make the room feel even smaller to put a strong colour on the walls, but it actually just makes the room feel cosy. We got rid of our large armchair,sofa bed and larger pieces of storage furniture, which housed our collection of 600 DVD's. I have filed these in a large cd wallet instead and put the cases in the loft, which just saved tons of space. The living room doubled as our guest room with the sofa bed, but we decided that making the room useful for our daily family life had to be our priority, so we swapped to a gorgeous dfs/ sofa workshop corner sofa which has as much seating as the armchair and sofa put together, but takes up less floor space.
I reupholstered my precious tub chair which originally lived in my dads bachelor pad as a young chap, and was a favourite chair when I was a child.
I got an end of roll piece of fabric on eBay for £25 and used my staple gun and glue gun to replace the old pink fabric. Bit of a bargain I think! I decided to keep my little bureau as it is really a useful piece of furniture and I use it as our office, and decided to pick out the aqua colours of the drawers as an accent to the grey. I also created some new artwork for the walls, incorporating the accent colours ...more about my artwork in another post.
But my favourite part of the room is hubby's handy work in the corner; previously our enormous 55 inch TV was the main focal point in the room which I really do not like, so hubby created a false 'inglenook' style fireplace for my little Dimplex stove complete with a beam that falls down to reveal all our media neatly tucked away out of sight.
I sewed a wall hanging with some fabulous map fabric we found and that hangs over the TV when it's not in use. Because the fireplace is in the corner of the room it just gives it that lovely quirkiness that I love so much rather than the generic, featureless room we started with.Finally, I made cushion covers in our accent colours from some remnants of beautiful Melin Tregwynt wool (it's a fabulous Welsh woolen mill just up the road from us) that I bought in the Mill shop, and crocheted a large cushion cover from some wool remnants I picked up. What I love so much about our new living room is that it is a joint creative effort between hubby and I, filled with handmade items we collaborated on and created ourselves, it really feels like a piece of us and a meeting of our tastes. And when I sit on my ridiculously comfy sofa and look out the window at the birds in the cherry tree, fire going and fairy lights twinkling, I could easiliy be sat in the cottage of my dreams.
I read somewhere that the key to contentment is learning to want what you have rather than have what you want, and I believe this to be true. I hope you have enjoyed reading about our journey to making what we already have into something we really love. We have lots of plans for the rest of the house, I will keep you posted!
Steph xx
