No 2. - The House

Home/lifestyle blog, you've met the residents...now what? Oh yeah, the house.

Right, as mentioned last year we moved in here in a rush and just took the first place that would allow us to have pets in it. Now that's not to say anything against the house, it's an alright place but just very...beige...and the previous tenants had apparently left quite a mess behind them. Our lovely landlady had this cleaned up before we moved in but there was no repainting or really fixing anything a bit broken done at the time.
Fast forward a year and although we've unpacked the boxes (heh, most of them anyway) we haven't really done anything else. We've put up a few pictures. Planted some flowers in the garden. Bought a new patio set (well, LTGF did that). Storage is a real issue for us here, and I'd love to repaint and freshen the house up. We have to sort out another years lease with the lovely landlady this month and we're going to ask if we can brighten the house up then. I'm adding photos of it now so A: you all can see the "before" and B: I'm be internet-shamed into actually doing something about it.

And so without further ado, the house...

This is the front hall. As you can see it's pretty small, especially since we have a (very untidy) shoerack in there, and about a BILLION* coats. It can also tend to smell a bit like feet due to all the shoes. People walking into your home and being greeted by shoes smells = not ideal!

 On leaving the hall you come into the sitting-room. It's dark (I had to use fill light in this photo so you could see it properly), the blinds don't work properly so they're down all the time making it even darker and that red wall...yuck! I also have a violent dislike of 99% of leather couches so keep them covered with some (admittedly rather tatty) patchwork throws. Oh and when it rains the chimney flicks little black soot stains all over the hearth and floor. Fun! You can see we have the two cats asleep in here, they're such lazy beggars!

 Straight in front of you as you come into the sitting-room is the books wall. It should be more organised than it is but we have a LOT of books. They're all over the house! There's also 3 didgeridoos, several boxes of "stuff", a reclining armchair we don't use that's piled with crap and lots of bits of collections. At least our red bookcase matches the red wall...

Standing at the fireplace and looking back you see the rest of the sitting room. Again, very dark and had to fill-light this photo too (and I even had the lights on!). It's pretty small and cramped, we really need to sort through our stuff and get a better layout for the furniture going on...

 The stairway is actually quite nice in the house, there's a large picture window (just out of shot) that lights it up really well and it's nice and compact so as not too take up too much room in our tiny house. Could do with being jazzed up a bit though right?

 Box room aka office aka my craft room. This is currently our dumping ground for everything. It holds my (spare) wedding dress, wedding coat (look, that's it hanging on the front of the wardrobe!), boxes of jewellery and jewellery-making equipment, sewing machine, art that came with the house that we didn't like, clothes for the charity shop and/or for making into other stuff, guitar, more books. You get the picture. It's a junk room.

 More of the junk room, this side from the window side. It's far too tiny for all the crap we have in it but some of it (like the chair in the picture that belonged to my Nan and she gave me before she passed away) holds such sentimental value that I can't get rid of it. Really need to sort this place out as well...

Main spare room aka LTGF's room. It's pretty bright as everything in it is white, white, white but that does make it a bit...boring. Oh and the carpet is PINK. Barbie pink. It's appalling.

 Main bathroom. Tiny. Windowless. Yup, that pretty much covers it...

 Master shower-room. Also tiny, but not so bad as the main bathroom as it does at least have a window. It also has some funky mold growing on the ceiling. And that shower curtain rail is rusty as rusty can be.

 Our (untidy) master bedroom. This is where the magic happens people! It's an okay size, though that HUGE wardrobe on the left takes up a lot of the floorspace. It does it us somewhere to hang our clothes though. But it is HUGE! My poor little dreamcatcher looks so small and pathetic on that wall - really need to get some art hanging there. I do love our (buried under a pile of washing) chair in front of the bed. It needs some serious love though and I am hoping to make that a project in the near future.

 View of our room from the bed. You can tell the messy dresser is mine right? Door leads into the shower room, and our only window and source of natural light is to the left just out of shot.

 Came out from photographing our room to find the 3 boys having a residents meeting on the top of the stairs...they always get suspicious when I start moving about the house with a camera in my hand!

 Downstairs loo in the stairhall (between the sitting room and kitchen/diner). It's actually a really good size for what it is but again, like the rest of the house, needs a but of pizazz!

 Kitchen section of kitchen/diner. Waaay too little storage with someone with as much kitchen crap as I do. All our spices etc have to be out on the counter as there's no room in the presses for them (also, that brown lump on the floor is a cat toy...not poop! LOL)

 Dining section of kitchen. We have ended up having to use one of our bookshelves as storage for canned goods, pastas, rices, etc as we just didn't have anywhere else to put them. This is why there is a HUGE pile of DVD's, games and the like hidden on the floor between the fireplace and long couch. Also, I'm being stalked by kitties.

Outside space. Yup, it really is that drab. We also have a small patio and HUGE shed to the right of this deck and a teeny-tiny patch of grass out the front.





























So there you have it, my online walk of shame through our house. Once we get the go-ahead from our lovely landlady I will be adding a to-do list of what we'll be doing to update the place. It's very hard when you're renting as the house isn't actually yours to dabble with and everything you do has to either be okay with the landlord/lady or removable. Also, it's hard to put money into something that's not going to benefit you in the long term (though I'm quite happy to shell out for paint as we will get at least a year out of it and all I want is her permission and for the oven to be fixed [our grill fell apart and we've had no grill since we moved in...sigh]).

Have you ever done something to update a rental property you lived in? How do you get around living in a bland "suit-all" space? What would you do if you lived here?

* - not an ACTUAL billion coats. Obviously.