Interiors Obssessed - Making our House a Home (Part 1)
Ok, so the last time I wrote here, I said it would hopefully be less than 10 months before I blogged again. Here I am, almost exactly 10 months later…
I never set out to be a professional blogger but I did want to create a space to share some of my favourite things and experiences. And, as I just received a notice from Squarespace to say that my subscription is due to renew in February, I’m thinking I should have one more shot at trying to get my blogging MOJO back.
So, what’s new? Well, I guess the main news is that we are now homeowners! In July last year we bought our first house and over the last seven months, we’ve been busy making it a home.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted my own home; there’s only so much you can do in a rented space when you’re restricted to magnolia walls and the [sometimes questionable] furniture choices of your landlord. I’ve been having a lot of fun finding my own home style, so I thought I’d pop on and share some of the projects we’ve undertaken so far, along with some of my favourite homewares buys.
If you follow me on Pinterest or Instagram, you’ve likely been on this journey with me (apologies if I have been boring you stupid with house stuff), but I thought this would give me a bit more space to elaborate on the inspiration behind some of our room refreshes, favourite finds, plus a space to look at some forthcoming home improvement projects that are in the pipleline.
The rooms that you can see the biggest difference now, versus when we moved in are our dining room and living room, so let’s start there. First up - the dining room.
Dining Room Refresh - from Green Room to Blue Room
From some of my earlier posts, you’ll probably have gathered that we are fans of food; we wanted our dining room to be a sociable space for entertaining and to force us to break old habits of eating mindlessly in front of the TV. The previous owners used this room as a second living room with a sofa and a small dining table and chairs but we wanted this to be solely a dining room; no TV/distractions, just a space to sit and eat and enjoy each other’s company, and other people’s too from time to time.
My inteiors photography has come along a little from the early days and I don’t have a before shot of this room in daylight but I do think the before and after pictures show a pretty dramatic transformation nonetheless.
Before
Sage green and cream walls, an interesting light fitting and my old desk as a dining table…
After
Two shades of blue create features of both walls, a longer dining table and pendant lighting elongate the space.
Whilst I actually liked the sage green colour that was already in the walls in this room, it just needed a bit of a freshen up. There’s great light in this room - and throughout the house - so I knew it could handle a darker colour. We scoured lots of samples and in the end settled for Dulux Denim Drift for a feature wall and Farrow & Ball Parma Grey on the other three walls. If I’m being entirely honest, when we patch tested Parma Grey, I thought it was more grey than blue, so it was a bit of a shock to the system when it came out as a fairly blue blue. However, over time it’s grown on me. As you’ll see from the pictures, the colours also look very different in different lights.
I guess our style is quite modern and minimalist; sometimes scandi, sometimes a little retro (I do love a bit of mid century modern styling). That being said, I think the minimalism may get dialled back a little over time; it’s a case of necessity as first time buyers - you focus your energy and money on the things you need most first. We took out a loan to help us get all of the big pieces we needed. We were starting from scratch, so needed pretty much everything and that’s quite an outlay to begin with.
One of those first big purchases - long before the big move - was our dining room table and chairs. I swear we spent about three months looking at different styles before we found what we were looking for. We wanted something contemporary and big enough to comfortably seat six or more people. We scoured so many furniture websites and spent countless Saturdays and Sundays in furniture mega stores but it was hard to find something that wasn’t either country kitchen in style or else resembled a boardroom table. Lead times were also a ‘mare in some of the bigger stores with 12 week plus waits with a lot of them. Eventually, we popped into Maven, just off the Lisburn Road in Belfast, where we found this gorgeous grey Hay Loop Stand table. it was ex display but in perfect condition and within our budget, so we snapped it up. I absolutely love this table and it’s a handy spot for any out of hours work I need to do from home too.
We deliberated over chairs for a while before settling on the Fjord dining chairs from Made.com in white and a contrasting blue. Priced at just £99 per pair, they were affordable and they’re also very comfortable to sit on too.
The lighting in this room was one of the first things we wanted to change and in practical terms, it was the first thing we had to do; well before any decorating. I am not always the most practical or patient person but, as himself soon explained, there was very little point decorating before the old light fitting was taken down and the new fittings were chosen, bought and installed. There was an unholy amount of mess created during this process, with more holes in the ceiling than a swiss cheese, but it was worth the pain in the long run.
I agonised over the choice of light fittings for quite some time. I knew I wanted pendants dropping down over the dining room table but there was so much choice out there. We eventually found and fell in love with these gorgeous Normannn Copenhagen Amp Pendants in smoke and brass at BTS Concept Store in Coleraine. They were a little spendy (£120 each) but well worth it, if you ask me. They’re a real feature in the room and they emit a really lovely, soft light when on. We initially bought two but with the size of the table, we quickly realised we needed three and the lovely Tracy from BTS quickly sorted us out with a third.
You may have spotted this little beauty in some of the other pics - it tends to punctuate pretty much every pictutre of this space - but this really is worthy of an eyeheart or two. I have wanted a Ferm Living planter for a very long time and once all of the essential purchases for the house were dealt with, it was amongst my first decorative purchases. I got this one in pink and brass from Maven and filled it with some indoor plants from Homebase. Perhaps miraculously, the plants are still going strong, having initially taken up residence here last September. It’s one of the pieces that people ask me about most when I post pictures of the house on Instagram and I know we’ll have this forever, so it was worth the investment.
The lovely ladies at Maven shared the new Ferm Living catelogue with me recently and oh. my. days. It’s worthy of a blog post on its own. So many beautiful things; I could literally buy it all.
In terms of what’s next for this room; we have a distinct lack of surfaces for displaying odds and sods, hence why everything does look a little minimalist. We would like to add a sideboard and dig the record player out of hibernation from the garage sometime over the next few months. I did create a little makeshift table from an Ikea stool over Christmas to create a spot in the corner for a lamp, our new Amazon echo, a candle and some dried eucalyptus in a lovely Garden Trading pot that my brother bought us for Christmas. I also have a little project in the works to add a set of bar shelves to the wall left of the window. So perhaps I’ll be back sharing another little room refresh/DIY project reveal here again before long. Let’s hope it’s less than 10 months before I’m back again, eh?
