The house decorating fun begins! {AD} – Mummascribbles

AD – In collaboration with Age UK Mobility

If there is one thing the pandemic brought us all, it was the chance to really think about what mattered to us. Not being able to see loved ones for so long made us want to see them so much more. Not being able to go to our favourite places made us want to visit them more. Not being able to go outside much made us want to get outside more. It spurred many people on to make changes in their lives, whether it was starting up a business, making a house move, leaving an unhappy marriage.

For us, it spurred us into a house move. Before the pandemic hit we had absolutely no plans whatsoever to move. But after months of spending our time on top of each other in a tiny house, with the other half working from our bedroom and me just wanting another downstairs room to escape to, we ended up moving over an hour away so we could get a much bigger house in a much nicer area! It was a huge move, a bit of a risk, but by far the best decision we could have made.

We all saw the DIY’s being done throughout lockdown didn’t we? I mean heck, we couldn’t get a delivery from any of the homeware stores because we were late to the mark with deciding to decorate our house (before we decided to sell it!). People were painting rooms, changing their gardens, adding bars, organising renovations, applying for extensions. Home adaptions during lockdown went crazy! Remember the queues when Homebase and B&Q reopened their doors again?!

Now we’ve moved into a new house, we have new bits to do ourselves. We are planning on making the downstairs loo into a shower room, we have just stripped the wallpaper in the front room so we can put our own up over bank holiday weekend, this week I’ll be painting the chimney breast in prep for the wallpaper either side of it, and we shall also be wallpapering a wall in the office when we do the front room walls. Then we need to re-carpet the front room and get new sofas and furniture before we then move onto our bedroom makeover!

It’s all a slow process because we are doing as much as we can ourselves so we can get more done overall. Originally I was going to get a decorator in to do the front room but it seems pointless when we can do those bits ourselves. Plus it is a big room and we have realised the carpeting is going to cost us a fair bit alone, so we are saving our money for the bits we can’t do ourselves!

It has been pretty hard to get going with it all because we moved in the middle of lockdown when most things were still closed, but now everything is open again we have started to look around at the things on our list. It is much easier going to see them in person rather than risking things off the internet that we haven’t seen before!

We haven’t ever really decorated a house, other than a few bits here and there, so it’s all quite a new adventure. Although I am terrible at making decisions and am rubbish at putting colours together and imagining what they will look like when complete! If you fancy following my journey, you can find my new home account over on Instagram at https://instagram.com/built_in_the_eighties.

Did you make any major lifestyle changes during lockdown, or did you make any of your own renovations or adaptions to your home?