I originally bought my house way back in 2006, sharing the mortgage with my dad. Back in spring, we sold the house to me and Joe (which was a long and very difficult process, especially in a pandemic).

As our business is doing well, and the house has had next to nothing done in many years, we’ve decided to do a lot of revamping and upgrading. This is not a good business decision, as we’re going to end up spending a lot of money with little to no difference on the house value – in fact it will likely drop in a recession – but we’re doing it for us and finally getting some benefit from our hard work (beyond our cleaner, who hasn’t been in several months, and lots of Deliveroo). Plus, it’s way less hassle than moving, especially as we haven’t seen any houses we like the look of.

We love our house. It was built in the 1990s, so we have all the benefits of totally straight walls and floors, a good roof etc., even if the look isn’t super exciting. It’s small, but the location is great and it’s very affordable. Plus, since we’ve been in lockdown approximately two years long than everyone else, it’s important to us that we make our home lovely and give it the TLC it deserves and has missed out on.

These are the things we have fully planned and booked in so far:

Porch

Our house has a kind of cubby on the front as an open place to put the bin, so we’re moving that out and creating a small enclosed porch. Hopefully it will be big enough to store most of our coats and shoes, and it will also mean the house is better insulated. We’re also replacing the door with two doors (inner and outer).

The best thing about creating a porch is that we’ll have an airlock type solution where opening the front door won’t let the cats out – they’ll just end up in the porch rather than escaping.

Windows

Our windows are the original house windows, just about double glazed but not really great, and wooden frames that the cats love to scratch at (yes, they already have a million options for scratching, both vertical and horizontal). We’re replacing them with much thicker smart glass windows (whatever they are) with PVC frames that are white on the inside, rosewood on the outside. (Our whole street is rosewood, so we don’t have much choice on that).

We’ll also be getting slightly different openings to some of the windows to make them more cat-proof.

Drainpipes & fascias

Not super exciting but again, they’re well-overdue on replacing. Although I’ll kind of be sad to see the wood aspects of the house go, they’re way too much work (that we’ve never been on top of) and we just want everything as low maintenance as possible.

Conservatory

I’m the first to say that I’m not a huge fan of conservatories. They always seem to be the wrong temperature and as much as I like big windows, I also love having wall space.

We’re getting the conservatory replaced with a gabled extension – a proper roof with skylights, but a big window at the front to keep a lot of the light. It’s working out a lot more expensive than we were originally told – they need to do some digging since it’s so close to water – but in the end I think it’ll be worth it.

The plan is to call it the “den” (“conservatory” is too many syllables!) and it’ll have big bookcases for all our board games. I’m hoping we can also fit our exercise bike and a rowing machine in there (we’ll see).

Garden

Our garden is super tiny, which is fine because we definitely aren’t garden people and can’t keep a plant alive. Having said that, we do like to have BBQs and sit outside to work/eat in the summer, and we do have a nice view to enjoy. The garden decking will be replaced with much more hardwearing and low maintenance composite decking, we’re getting two new fences, and maybe an awning to act as a parasol.

I’m also looking at modular garden furniture that will serve all the different purposes we need – relaxing, eating full meals, and entertaining friends. So far I’ve found a couple of options – the small space we have to work with is proving an issue as we want comfy seating – but we may wait until next year to get that and a BBQ.

(You can see my Pinterest board for the garden & den here).
 

Beyond this is a kind of phase two, aka things we haven’t booked yet but want to do at some point after all the other things are done.

Bathroom

While we replaced our super awful kitchen a few years ago, the bathroom hasn’t been touched other than replacing the bath and shower when we originally moved in. I’d love to get the whole thing re-done; as a minimum retiling and replacing everything, or ideally moving the toilet and having a bigger bath in the space.

Garage conversion

We have a lot of junk in there, and I’d like to expand our living space by making it into a proper, useable-all-year-round room. It could also be used as a bedroom if we rented our house out in future, which if we rented to multiple occupants, would increase the rentable value a lot.

Living room

We bought new furniture for our living room in spring, not all of which is up and in place yet. I’d love to have it completely repainted, with “white with a hint of grey” walls rather than the current magnolia we have. I’d also like to have the ceiling skimmed and white natural light spotlights added, as it’s the room we spend most time in and a lot of that is doing work. Depending on how much difference the windows, porch and other changes make, I’d also consider getting aircon as our house gets stupid hot.

Shutters

I love how internal shutters look, and how flexible they can be with how much light you can let in and where that light comes from. I also think shutters would be a little more secure and less maintenance than curtains – the curtains we do have aren’t the best and I’d love to replace them with something pretty.

As I’m typing this, we have tree guys over cutting back our hazelnut tree and front garden tree, so I guess the work has kind of begun?! Excited to see how it ends up looking!