Hello you lovely lot. Today I’m talking home improvements. And no, I haven’t been watching too much daytime TV (although I do enjoy a spot of ‘The House That £100k Built’ around 2pm, not gonna lie). Uh huh, I’m living that daytime TV life.
So I know what you’re thinking. You only just renovated your place, it should be blinkin’ perfect. And it is. It absolutely is, for a couple to live in happily. But whaddaya do when your home suddenly becomes a pooch hotel?
It became clear, quite quickly, that I needed to make a few clever adaptations in our house in order to make way for my new business. And the first thing that needs to be said is that my patient and adoring husband-to-be has been insanely understanding and laid back about the whole thing. Even when I’m like ‘we need to halve our belongings so I can sell all the furniture in the spare room to convert it into doggy paradise’.
I mean, where did I find this guy? He’s a saint (I actually found him across the road, no jokes. We’re like a proper cliché love story.)
So the work began. The most important things were:
A. Making space. I currently have a dog the size of a small pony staying and it’s nice for him to be able to trot around freely. Also, some dogs turn up with a blanket & nada, other dogs turn up as though they’re moving in. I needed the space for their things and therefore, my stuff had to go.
B. Creating a tranquil workspace for me. As well as looking after all the dogs of Rayleigh, I also looking after social media accounts for businesses. So I needed a desk space to sit and work and not eat 2819 snacks throughout the day. (Recently I’ve been working in the kitchen and that is NOT a good idea. The fridge has power over me like nothing else).
Mission ‘turn the spare room into a pooch hotel’ began.
So I was pretty ruthless. I had to be. I pretty much got rid of ALL my clothes in my second wardrobe. It was mostly work stuff anyway, and considering my new work uniform is active wear, I didn’t really need a lot of those things anymore. So we condensed a double wardrobe down and sold it. Oh and we also sold an Ikea chest which we used to keep loads of old shoes in. And we sold our corner desk which seemed to take up insane amounts of space. Gone. Bubyeeeee.
Then TAH DAH we suddenly were left with far more space to play around with. We actually had wall space. We bought a new single wardrobe which was teeny tiny in comparison to the one we had and we spun the ‘day bed of dreams’ around to sit against our blue feature wall. And y’know something? My top tip for anyone furnishing a home is; don’t furnish up to your eyeballs. I can’t believe how much we got rid of and the difference it made to the space in the room. We clearly didn’t NEED that stuff.
And then, and then and then and thennnnnn. We invested in a very nice desk. A small, compact, sexy looking desk. We did look on IKEA and Argos as we were determined to get something cheap and cheerful but we just couldn’t find what we wanted. So we online purchased this Habitat desk one evening when we’d exhausted all other avenues.
I mean, it’s teeny tiny. As in it could be a childs desk. But hey, it leaves more space in the room and it stops me from bringing snacks to my workspace (absolutely no space for that plate of biscuits, nah ah).
Also, big shoutout to Gumtree. I sold all my old furniture on there – so flippin’ easy. If you wanna turn a room round super quick, I’d highly recommend sticking your stuff on there that you wanna get rid of pronto. I posted the chest on there one morning and by the afternoon it was gone.
And that’s that really. It’s not done, obvs. I really want a wire memo board to go on the blue feature wall and I’m thinking about some shelving on the wall you can’t see in these photos (a dog crate sits there currently, and all my visiting dog’s worldly belongings).
But I’m pretty pleased with how quickly we were able to turn it all around.
Happy Wednesday everyone. Tell me about YOUR home renovation plans? I totally can’t do anything more to this house so it would be nice to muse over someone elses…
