Keeping it real!

I thought I would explain a bit about the start of my journey with home interiors. 

My boyfriend and I purchased our first house in January last year. Our first house is a 1930s 3-bed semi detached and needed modernising throughout. Think lots of artex and wallpapered bathrooms, so it’s not the worst house in the world and we could have lived with it. My 83 year old grandad stroking the walls of our badly painted anaglypta wallpaper telling us how lovely it was, meant work had to begin right away (he still has an avacodo green bathroom suite!) So we moved in and immediately wanted to make our mark on the place (we started stripping the living room about 2 hours after moving all of our stuff in, much to the horror of my whole family!). 

When we first started the pair of us didn’t have much DIY knowledge (thank goodness for YouTube). We wanted to get everything done at a million miles an hour and thought we’d have the house complete by the end of the year, how wrong we were! It’s been a long, hard slog and there have been tears and tantrums along the way (mostly me). I thought our house would look like something out of the pages of The White Company catalogue but real life isn’t like that. Real life is disconnecting a radiator wrongly and not being able to stop water pouring out of the lock shield value because you’ve snapped it (Jack). Real life is starting to paint the wall in the middle cause you don’t know that you need to cut in first and you’re desperate to see the colour on the walls (me). Real life is sanding for so long your hand resembles a claw and your eyes burn from the dust (both of us). Real life is removing a skirting board and dislodging all the tiles on the bay window so it literally looks like the house Jack built. There’s days when the easiest task turns into a massive argument and an emergency trip to Wickes at 3.50pm on a Sunday afternoon, when you’re praying it hasn’t shut before you get there because you’re not quite sure the house and your relationship will survive until Monday morning. 

For both of us it’s been really hard work, a lot harder than we ever thought it would be. Yeah some days everything goes wrong and you think what’s the point, but I’m really proud of how much we’ve done ourselves and how much we’ve learnt along the way. It’s made our relationship a thousand times stronger and it’s taught us  that we’re actually very resourceful and resilient. For me especially I’ve learnt not to always believe what I see on instagram; for every perfect picture there’s 6 months hard slog, blood, sweat and tears. Nothing is as perfect as it seems and would we really want it to be? 

Sophie 

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