Our latest project

Some of you may know that we run a guest house and you may know that 2 years ago we decided to sell it and go back to having a normal life, we put it on the market, found a buyer, found a house to move, took a drop in the sale figure, found a cheaper house to move to, began to dream of living like a normal family again, ordered boxes to pack into and our buyer pulled out.  The fall-out was pretty massive.  I retreated into a place that I never want to go again and as horrible as it felt to be me it was way worse to have to live with me.  Two years on and we have done what we always do and dusted ourselves off and got on with things and we now do look back and think ourselves genuinely lucky that our buyer pulled out, we were selling for a very small amount of money and would have walked away with nothing to show for 9 years incredibly hard work.

We have now accepted that we have a minimum of another 5 years here so have decided that we need to make our accommodation nicer.  The basement currently has a large storage room, 2 small rooms that we created out of a big room to make a bedroom each for the kids a hall area with a sink and some "kitchen" type wall units, a large lounge, our bedroom and a big bathroom.  Now that Tom has gone to Uni we are going to have a complete re-jig.  We are going to take down the partition wall and turn the kids 2 rooms back into one large room which will become the lounge.  The existing lounge is going to be our bedroom and Emily will move into our bedroom.  When Tom is home he can either have a guest room upstairs or sleep in the lounge - we are buying a nice big sofa so he'll be comfortable!

We spent yesterday ripping out our lounge.  We carried 2 big sofas out of the lounge, up an external staircase, through the car park, into the laundry and eventually put them in the guests lounge where they look great.  We also heaved the old guests sofas out the back door ready to go in the skip!  We removed the fire surround and electric fire we had fitted in our lounge and took down the curtains and pole.  The room that is to be our bedroom has a adjacent room that will make a great walk in wardrobe, it was used as a storage area so we emptied that too.

We are just back from B&Q having picked the wall paper for the "statement" wall that the bed will sit on and the paint for the other 3 walls.  Are statement walls a bit naff? Possibly but I love the idea!  Here's the paper

Its plum with a pearl coloured pattern - it looks much warmer here than it is because the point and shoot's white balance is off.

This gives a better idea of the colour of the paper and shows the paint too.

 
Its Dusted Cappuccino.  We are going to add plum bedding and curtains.

I love the wall paper!

This gives an idea of the size of the wall - the door at the end opens into the "walk in wardrobe" to be!  I love looking at other peoples homes because I am very nosey!  I hope this is an interesting post and you'll want to see the basement project as it progresses in an occasional post?