So its been nearly a full year since Mr Kat and I moved into our first home. We've rented various places (one together and numerous shared - with other housemates/Uni friends etc) but this is our first, proper, bought-with-our-own-money house, and very happy we are with it too.
It's something of a 'quirky' little house - definitely not to everyones tastes. It is spread out over three floors (nowhere near as grand as it sounds, I can assure you) - the kitchen and bathroom are in the basement and the two bedrooms on the top floor. This means that, not only is the toilet a mere three steps from the cooker (mmmmmm, hygeinic!), but we have to run down two flights of stairs just to go to the loo if nature calls during the night. Not ideal.
So, as you can imagine, we have one or two small renovation projects in mind for the future (Bathroom Relocation is definitely at the top of my list!) and, as soon as we've saved up a few extra pennies/won the Euro Millions, we'll be All Systems Go.
In the meantime, we (Mr Kat and his Dad) have just been furiously slapping paint on the walls and trying to brighten the place up as much as our micro budget will permit.
Mr Kat has also taken it upon himself to build shelves in just about every alcove/stairwell/stationary object in our house, frequently out of old off-cuts of slightly soft wood that he found under the stairs (see left).Still, its amazing what a good few coats of white Satinwood can do!
So, whilst Mr Kat continues to thrive in the role of Head Painter/All-round Mr Fix It, I have promoted myself to House Stylist and taken it upon myself to adorn the multitude of shelves and freshly painted walls with any pretty artifacts I can lay my hands on.
This gorgeous thing on the right is a tea towel which my best friend in the world printed as part of her final year collection in her Fashion degree in 2004. It sat alongside a fabulous range of homeware products, including some beautiful retro-housewife style aprons which I have long-since coveted. She was kind enough to let me have one of the tea towels after the exhibition and I love it so much I just had to keep it somewhere safe (I couldn't very well use it to mop up spillages in the kitchen could I?).
So now it sits pretty on my bedroom wall and makes me feel very smiley and nostalgic whenever I look at it. It is quite possible that I am the only person in the world who has a framed tea towel in her bedroom!
So day by day our house is being transformed into a little home filled with our own personal touches and slightly scruffy oddities which we are becoming rather fond of.There's a real money-can't-buy pleasure in knowing that everything we are creating has come out of our (Mr Kat's) own hard work and effort - it's so tempting these days just to whip out the credit cards and buy a readymade home, complete with brand new furniture in every room and pictures to go on all the walls, but where's the fun in that!
Our third-hand sofa goes quite nicely with our third-hand TV and our £11.99 coffee table. We will get around to upgrading some of these items eventually but, for now, they serve us well and remind us that we're really just starting out in this big home-owning adventure. Who wants to rush ahead and miss out the "roughing it" stage altogether!
Ahhhhh, what an old hippy I appear to have become. Who knew!!
Happy Friday-eve everyone!
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