We bought a house !!!

I’ve been super quiet on here I know. But something so exciting happened! In January 2021 we put an offer in on a house. Our offer was declined initially, so we decided we would save some more, keep looking and wait a while. In February, Ieu got a call that asked if we still wanted the house. Of course we said yes, and our offer was accepted.

After a lot of chats with our mortgage broker, solicitor and each other by May we had the keys to our house! It’s a long process for sure but so worth it and I was so grateful to be working for a solicitors during so I had a vague idea of what was going on.

We needed to do some work on our house, which is why I am writing this blog. Here’s a log of our before and after! The day we got our keys we went straight to the house after work to show my family around and take our before pictures. It was so surreal, we hadn’t seen our house since the first viewing 5 months before but it was how we remembered it and now better as it was ours!

I took the next day off work and mum came up with me to do some initial cleaning and I showed some friends around too. We started the cleaning process in the kitchen. Sky came to fit the Wifi and TV, which was so lucky as they could come the day after we got the keys! After cleaning the kitchen we realised we needed to replace to kitchen cupboard handles. For now the kitchen was ideal and a little clean made it look even better. We didn’t need to do any painting in the upstairs room nor did we need to replace the carpets on the stairs.

The next day we started stripping the wallpaper in the living room, that was a challenge. Lucky we had 5 hands on deck; me, Ieu, mum, dad and Ieu’s dad. There were two layers to remove, under that the walls were actually in great condition. The same day Ieu’s dad mowed our very over grown lawn and we started painting the kitchen and the bathroom ceilings. Ieu took away all the things from the bathroom.

Next day it was time to paint the kitchen, it was quite a grim purple/grey colour so we (from here ‘we’ is Ieu, Mum, Dad, Gwen and I) needed a few coats of magnolia to cover it. We had some glorious weather this week which was amazing because the paint was drying so quick. We moved on to paint the conservatory – Gwen even came to help. We then started painting the living room, all of these rooms were going to be magnolia as we wanted to brighten up the house completely. Our living room would have one feature wall though.

Another coat on the kitchen, conservatory and living room the next day. We also picked up the things that our friend was nice enough to store for us. Our fridge-freezer was put into the kitchen, it fit perfectly. We also picked up our dining table, sofa bed and spare bed that would be kept in the shed until we were finished inside. We all decided we needed a pub break after today so finished a little earlier and made our way to the pub.

We were now into June and ready to start the bedroom, clean the conservatory down and paint the living room feature wall. Ieuan’s grandparents popped over for the tour and brought us pots and pans – their kind gift to us!

More work on the bedroom, we decided we wanted panelling on our feature wall in here. Ieu did it all himself and it was super impressive. This wall was going to be a darker grey than the rest of the room. We also painted our hall. I say we but this was mostly mum and dad.

Most of the doors in our house are wooden. It was down to me and dad to sand down and beeswax them today. Ieu did the laminate flooring in the hall all by himself, it might even be my favourite flooring throughout the house.

Today arrived the microwave, kettle and toaster so we decided to fill and complete the kitchen. This was our first room complete.

Kitchen before;

Kitchen after;

We finished the painting conservatory this day too but we still had a long way to go before it was complete. Ieu sorted the bathroom out by getting and fitting a new shower screen.

Bathroom before;

I started moving clothes and shoes and little things to the house. Unfortunately, we still had some work to do but our week off was over and it was time to go back to work.

We got our carpets fitted which meant we could start properly filling the house with things! We only needed new carpets in the living room and bedroom. We had our sofa’s on order and they would be a few more weeks so we used the sofa bed we planned to use in the conservatory in the living room. More flat packs were built and more furniture was brought up. Slowly but surely rooms were coming together.

12 of June, we moved into our home together. It’s a very surreal feeling, I personally never believed I would ever get here but we did 🙂 ❤ Very grateful for my family and all their help with getting our house ready. Unfortunately, we didn’t have our blinds yet, so we used cardboard for our bedroom.

Bedroom before and during;

Bedroom after;

As you can see there’s a little fur friend on our bed. Our rescue cat Tink joined us a month after we moved in and it’s like she lived here forever.

Hall before, during and after;

Living room before;

Living room during;

Living room done;

Conservatory before, during & after;

Upstairs

Garden before;

Garden done;

Having our own house has been everything we’d hoped for and more. We love cooking and chilling together. I can’t believe how much cleaning you have to do and bins aren’t my favourite. It’s just so wonderful 🙂 We feel so lucky and grateful to get have this house together. It’s so close to my family too so they are definitely not rid of us ❤ We still have some work to do while we live here and we have some ideas we want to do in the future but as you know houses, furniture and bills are expensive so it will be a project for us for over the years and we can’t wait.