We Needed a Bigger House to be Locked down in. -

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So if there’s one thing that COVID-19 has proven, is that the four walls of our little terrace house are too small for us to live in 24/7 with all our stuff…

Not to mention, I’m starting to boredom shop, so my thought process has now become: “how can I disguise all this clutter without having any more storage space?!”

When I asked A to move in with me, we’d only been dating 5 months. I’d been made redundant, and the rent on his work-supplied flat was also coming to an end- he could either move back into his house in Peterborough or move in with me until he/we found somewhere bigger.

So September 2018 we got a storage unit for the things that definitely wouldn’t fit in my small two-bed terrace, and everything else got moved in. I’d just had my garden done and was really sad that I wouldn’t get to spend another summer enjoying it.

Turns out, I didn’t have to worry. We’re now 3 summers post-initial dread, and only just gotten the keys to our new house. A three bed, but with soooooo much more space. Finally, A’s sofa cushions will be moved out of my spare room and we can start our new clutter-free life together.

We’ve got the keys to our house in a fairly affluent neighbourhood in Birmingham, which at our age would be near impossible unless it was either inherited or someone had been murdered in it. Luckily, neither was the case. The couple who originally owned the house had lived in it since they got married over 50 years ago, and probably hadn’t decorated since then either.

So the pricetag came with a caveat: it would need renovation. Stat.

The house was originally listed in April 2019 and it’s easy to see why it didn’t sell:

It was most definitely stuck in a timewarp, and due to the demands of the garden vs. the limitations of the owners bodies over time, that too was left to nature and has become increasingly jungle-esque.

Luckily, after evidently reading the “Estate Agents Guide to House Selling”, and summising that the most effective way to get this house sold would be to gut the kitchen and bathroom, they did just that, and by March 2020 we had an offer accepted on the house- complete with new kitchen, bathroom, carpets and repainted bedrooms.

At least there’s a couple of headaches we won’t have to consider.

The bathroom is beautiful and the kitchen is not what we would have put in but we can live with it. The carpet is GOING- it’s itchy and I keep getting carpet burn on my butt every time I sit on it (thanks to the lack of furniture)- that, and because the grotesque fireplace will also meet its maker, we’ll have a few carpet-less patches that we’d either need to patch in or just replace. So yay to something nicer!

But can we talk about the ceilings for a second please? I need to understand. Who in their right mind WALLPAPERS THE CEILING?!

We’ve peeled some of it away and found perfectly smooth ceilings underneath so why wallpapering was even considered an option is beyond me, and just adds to our ever expanding to-do list.

But onwards and upwards!

We finally got the keys on June 19th 2020 after being locked down since the offer was accepted. Massively disappointing as we could have used that time to start our renovation, but no point crying over spilt milk. I’m excited to get stuck in!