In which we acquire a time warp.

My family has finally bought a new house! As we've had such difficulty selling our current home we couldn't get a new one unless we bought a little house to do up and eventually rent our current one. So after months of messing about with lawyers and difficult people we managed to buy a new little property.

Inside was not exactly brilliant, though the rooms where of an okay size they where decorated horrifically, I mean seriously badly. Every surface was patterned and or colourful in the worst possible way. Everywhere was covered in grease and dust as though the place hadn't been touched since the sixties.  The entrace hall to the house had this horrid red carpet and everything smelt like Chinese food. The hall is actually surprisingly spacious and we think would be a good location for our huge mirrors that currently live in our living room. Moving from a relatively large Victorian house to a modern one is part of the challenge.

 The living room has a large plastic wood style gas fireplace that is going to ripped out and large sliding glass doors that lead out to the garden.  The garden is the main reason that we bought this house, it is large enough to keep the dogs happy, entertain in and have chickens in.  The house is really bright, the kitchen is decent sized and its in a really lovely area so the house isn't too much of a compromise. It will also hopefully be a decent investment in the slightly more longer term. 

As I mentioned before the kitchen is fairly large, when we got it they had 50's units that had probably been there as long, everything was covered in a thick layer of grease. They had put tin foil up on the walls to act as a splash back from the grease, that had been there so long the sellotape holding it up had been painted over. Grim. We plan on gutting the kitchen and knocking the wall between that and the little dining room down as the dining space is sort of wasted. 

 

The little dining space we plan to knock through into has the weirdest set of patterned wall paper, horrid flooring, swirly boarders and odd ceiling tiles. It seems like an awful lot of work but it is mostly cosmetic. 

The last room on the ground floor is the utility room which runs the length of the house that you enter through the dining room, which will make so much more sense when we knock through the dining kitchen wall. Who designed a utility room off a dining room in the first place. The utility is where the downstairs loo is and is probably going to be the most work as it needs totally re plastering. 

The utility also leads onto the garden, the garden is rather large and has a little concert patio at the moment. We plan on removing the sycamore tree and all the saplings around the edge of the garden, we also need to remove a ton of brambles and creepers from the over grown garden. The patio is being redone bigger so there is a place for a barbecue, table and chairs, and entertaining space.  We also need to replace parts of the ramshackle fence. 

Back in the house the upstairs is in a similar state to the rest of the house, sixies carpets and horrid mismatched wallpaper throughout. And equally as filthy, a lovely collection of cobwebs amassed everywhere. The weird thing is the house was lived in by a family all the time so how it has become a time capsule from the sixties is beyond me. how could you live like that and not go mad?  

There are two double bedrooms that look out on to the garden with huge windows and one small single that faces the front garden. They are actually really bright nice rooms if you can get past the car crash decor.   The wallpaper is all textured and the carpets where geometric oddities. 

The single room was particularly badly decorated with blue and silver striped wallpaper mixed with the worst carpet in the whole house.  It has a funny little step where the stairs cut into the room so we plan on turning that into a little bench type thing or wardrobe depending on how the room looks when we have thing in it, as each time we've returned to the house it feels bigger and bigger. This room is going to become the guest room.

Lastly is the upstairs bathroom, a delightful *ahem* grey and an pink faded tiled room with strange flowers and enough grim to classify as a biohazard. At one point my Mim was attempting to clean the bath and the side fell off it, she just threw it away. That shall be a total over haul as well.

So thats it, the beginning of our new home, a fun little project. What fun!

Yours 

Belinda Stepford

xxx