Hello from our new home!
Well, it’s been a wild ride to get here but we’re in! Moving on its own is seriously stressful, but moving during a pandemic just about broke me. It was EMOSH.
First things first – why did we move? It really just felt like the right thing to do, in the end. I’ve said before in this post, I bought this flat as a project – I thought it would be fun to slowly renovate another flat and share it on here. I actually viewed the flat alone (Jord was busy with the shop) but when we got the keys, I was actually in New York so Jordan went to check the place was a-okay.
He took one look at it and said “we should move in!”. I wasn’t actually keen on the idea, but the more work I did on the flat, the more I fell in love with it.
I always said I would slowly renovate this place and make bigger and better decisions because we had the luxury of not living there while work was being done to it. In the end, it didn’t quite work out like that, although it was SLOW. A few weeks after we closed on the property, I ended up in hospital after an accident and due to the operation, I was out of action for about six weeks. It was a really tough time, and I was only just feeling more like myself when I had to leave to shoot Scotland’s Home Of The Year for two months, and straight after we wrapped my mum sadly passed away so I travelled back to New Zealand for her funeral and to help my dad sort everything out.
By the time I got home, it was nearly Christmas! We started the bulk of the renovations at the start of this year, and just as we were starting to make good progress with it, the pandemic shut everything down. I sort of wrote it off at the start of lockdown, I didn’t think we would get anything done – but our builders managed to get back to it in due course and now we’re almost done! PHEW.
So we moved from one flat to another, which sounds odd to some, but the new place has a garden (albeit shared, but it’s more than our last place had!), three bedrooms (compared to two in our last place) and is bigger in general.
It’s perfect for us as we love the big Victorian flats here in Glasgow, they have enough space and are close enough to the centre of town. We don’t feel ready to move in to a house just yet, but we think in a year or so we’ll start working towards finding a house to renovate.
We gutted the entire place and stripped it back to the bare bones, which I always knew I would do because it had been a rental and needed a lot of work. It needed fully replastered, new floors, new appliances and an entirely new kitchen (with a new layout and utility room!) and I wanted a wet-room (complete with bath and shower) in our small bathroom. It was chaos, and towards the end I had total decision fatigue and just started going with whatever was easiest. Not the slow, easy project I had in mind, but it was a learning curve for sure!
My favourite parts of the flat are definitely the crazy arched shelves we had built in the living room. I knew as soon as I saw this room that I would have Parisian-style panelling, huge arched green shelves, a mustard sectional sofa and a dining table along the back wall. It is literally as I envisioned it all those months ago, I couldn’t be happier with it.
The kitchen is still coming together, we need to finish painting the cornicing we had fitted, finish fitting the lights and have some more shelves added. I’m also on the look-out for a big rattan/glass cabinet to keep all my plates and bowls in, so if anyone sees anything…!
There’s a lot we need to do, one of the bedrooms is just filled with boxes – we don’t even have any furniture for it! But we’re making progress and it feels like home a little more now. It was hard leaving our last flat when we loved it so much, and going from somewhere that was so finished to somewhere that was still (especially the week we moved in!) resembling a building site was really tough, but we’re so much more settled now. I can’t wait to share so much more of the renovations with you all!
Our happy new home! I hope you enjoy this sneak peek – what’s your favourite room?!