After a long drawn out moving process, which had many setbacks along the way, we were absolutely itching to crack on with the renovation as soon as the keys were in our hands. We plan to extend the kitchen and utility room one day, so whilst we've invested in replastering and new electrics in the rest of the house, this temporary makeover was always going to be about being simple, quick and super cheap. We just needed to make it liveable for 3 years or so.The only proplem there is...There was lime green EVERYWHERE.

Our small family home: A full house tour

The time has finally come to say goodbye to our first home, our beautiful little Victorian mid-terrace house with the yellow door. We have had so many wonderful memories here, including bringing our youngest daughter home at just 6 hours old, hosting parties, working together on DIY projects, watching both our children learn to walk and talk, and, of course, I am very grateful to have been able to call it ours. However, it is almost two years to the day that we decided to move on so, honestly? My heart has not been here for a while. It has been with the other three houses we've tried to buy along the way, it has been dreaming of driveways and downstairs toilets and space for dishwashers. We were completely content with our situation, but as soon as our head was turned by something different, I'm ashamed to say our patience for the little niggles mentioned above started to wear thin. Family life grew and two active children (potentially more one day?) require more than a couple with a baby who doesn't move.And so, to sign off our adventure in this home on the blog, I have curated a mammoth house tour for you full of all the juiciest before and after shots! We have learnt so much from the renovation - we made a lot of mistakes and compromised more than we would have liked to due to budget (we spent approx. £6500 in total for the whole house) but overall we have both really enjoyed the process. I hope you like it!

Our girls' shared bedroom with bunk beds

DISCLAIMER: These bunk beds were purchased by myself, with 50% off, in exchange for an honest blog post and pictures of the product. This is the first time I have collaborated on something like this so do let me know what you think and please ask me any questions you have about the bunk beds - all thoughts and words are, and always will be, my own!As our youngest daughter began to outgrow her cot, it felt natural to look towards bunk beds as a solution for our girls' shared bedroom. Not to mention our eldest daughter has been asking for them for a while now, and kept telling people, 'when we move to the big house, we're going to have bunk beds and I'm going to sleep on the top and Betty will sleep on the bottom...' I'm not entirely sure where she got that idea from as we never promised anything specifically, but our hope was to have bunk beds set up in the new house as a surprise when they arrived.Anyway, as regular readers of this blog will know, the house sale fell through at the last minute so we're still in our old house for the moment (you can read what happened here), but babies carry on growing, and cots don't grow with them, so we decided to find a new solution even if it meant building new bunk beds that we'd have to dismantle a few months later.Due to our youngest being only 20 months old, we were keen to get a bed with the bottom bunk bed close to the ground, which this house bunk bed from House About Kids does perfectly. The ladder is also on a slant, has handles and wide steps, which is perfect for our girls who aren't as physically confident as other kids their age. In fact, we visited a friends house at the weekend who have the Ikea Kura Bunk (another serious contender for us) but Darcey struggled to go up and down the ladder so I'm glad we didn't go for that one just yet. As the years pass, I also think this bed has plenty of room to reinvent itself . I'm looking forward to making sweeping canopy's, hanging plants, adding greenery and more fairy lights, maybe curtains of some sort for the bottom bunk, I could go on...! (**insert husband rolling eyeballs here**)

Our New Front Door: Before and After

I can honestly say it's the best £1000 we've ever spent. We've never had a huge budget for doing up this house, but to spend 1/6 of that on getting rid of the old UPVC door and transforming our homes curb appeal was definitely the best decision we ever made. I absolutely hated our old door, and I hate to admit I'm this shallow, but it genuinely made me feel embarrassed about the house. We'd worked so hard on transforming the interiors, but 95% of people only ever saw that horrible plastic white thing more akin to a static caravan home than a Victorian cottage in the beautiful South Downs National Park. I remember our first Christmas in the village, taking Darcey for a little walk in the pram to get some fresh air and coming home to Matt exclaiming 'I swear we have the only UPVC door in the WHOLE village, everyone has beautiful Christmas wreaths on their beautiful Farrow and Ball doors and ours is just BLEURGH!!!' (You may come to realise I'm never one to understate my feelings...)