Moving house as part of a big chain - the saga continues

I am writing this in utter disbelief, with tears rolling down my cheeks, splashing the keys on my laptop and moistening my angrily tapping fingertips.Six months ago, I shared with you all how our house move had fallen through at the last moment. Whilst heartbroken and raw, I read it back now with shock at how positive I was, even then, in what felt like a very dark moment. Of course I could write then with the hope that this sort of thing never happens twice? Surely that is unheard of? Surely the next house we find will be THE one? Turns out I was wrong. I know I've lost all perspective, but honestly, right now I feel like moving house is impossible.This time around we were in a chain of six, but we'd got even closer. A few weeks ago everyone was talking about moving this very Friday (22nd June). We had a date! We had started arranging childcare, received quotes for removal men, cleared out the loft, the kitchen and the under stairs cupboard. My word, I'd even cleaned the oven in preparation!However, today we found out that #3 in the chain (our buyer's buyer) has pulled out. Our buyers are no longer proceedable. Therefore we have to put ours on the market again, which for one reason or another, will be the fifth time in 22 months. We have spent close to £2000 on trying to move and we are back to square one. Except now we lack the innocent, giddy hope we began the process with - we just feel cynical, jaded and powerless.

Moving House, My Thoughts On21 June 2018Moving House Comments

#ourkidslivehere: A new family and interiors Instagram hashtag challenge

Do you love stylish interiors but also have kids? Do you know they can actually be compatible together?!Sometimes it's just a case of seeing how others do it, to inspire you to do the same. What hacks do they use? How do they make the shared room for the kids work both practically and aesthetically? Where the heck do they put all the ugly toys?!That's why Coral Atkinson (@coral.atkinson, founder and creator behind the beautiful Velveteen Babies) and I (@theottohouse), have decided to start a new hashtag challenge which we hope will encourage people to share, and be inspired by, stylish and creatively decorated homes which have our family lives at the centre. Our homes may not always look straight out of a magazine but they do have life to the fullest enjoying every inch of them. You will be able to find all this inspiration under the hashtag #ourkidslivehere and you can add your own pictures to the feed too by popping the hashtag in the caption underneath your picture. We would love you to feel free to include your kids in these pictures if you like, but without them is totally fine too (we don't want anyone 'styling' their kids into a shot just for Instagram!) We will share our favourites on our Instagram stories and, at the end of each month, our favourite picture will win an amazing prize from an incredible independent interiors based brand! So, be sure to follow both our accounts so you don't miss out on the news including which fabulous prizes we have coming up!

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**)

Buying and Selling our Home - The Reality

If you've been following me for a while here, or on Instagram, you'll be well aware we've been trying to move house. Despite having only lived here for just over two years now, we always saw this house as a vessel to get our foot on the bottom rung of the property market. We renovated and decorated with that in mind (the house is completely painted in white, for instance) and nearly all our decisions have been rooted in the thought that this house, although much loved, is fairly temporary.To cut a very long (16 month) story short, after heaps of house viewings and offers falling through on other houses, a few weeks ago we were finally very close to moving. A three bed Victorian semi-detached with a drive and a garden, on a quiet road in a fantastic catchment area - just what we wanted and the perfect home to (maybe, once we've caught up on sleep!) expand our precious family in. We'd had the survey done on the house we were moving to and so far, despite being in a chain of five, everything had gone smoothly. We'd had a builder friend of ours come and see the house and we'd drawn up plans to reconfigure the downstairs. I was pinteresting like MAD for inspiration, and even spent a whole evening looking at different hinges and brackets for kitchen units on the IKEA website. Our hearts and minds had already moved...

My Thoughts On, Reno Budgeting31 January 2018House Buying, Real Life Comments

How to buy furniture at auction like a pro

Following on from my blog post last week about what to expect when buying furniture at auctions, here are some very important tips you should know before embarking on your bargain shopping spree at your local auction house...Measure up! I have a little notebook I take around with me everywhere with all the important dimensions of our home in. You never know what you're gonna find on that day, so although you might go in thinking, I need a desk that is 'xyz', you may get there and find a gorgeous mirror and end up wondering what the heck is the distance between 'abc' instead. I asked, Catherine Hockley, director of our local auction house, Andrew Smith & Son, to share some tips on finding something that is the right fit for you: "Our salerooms are very large and so some items look small in them - always bring a tape measure, or borrow one from us, and make sure that the item you are bidding on will fit through your door or up your stairs."She also goes on to say, "Check the condition well before you buy, for wobbly legs or sticking drawers etc. Most things can be easily mended, but make sure it is within your capabilities or you will end up paying for restoration."

11 steps to buying furniture at a real-life auction

After my popular post last week about how we've furnished our home on a budget, I've had so many questions about all the auction bargains we've collected over the years that I thought it necessary to write up a little guide so that you can start buying amazingly priced, but beautiful, good-quality furniture for your homes too. In a poll created on my Instagram stories, 87% of you shared you have never bought anything at auction which shows it is a massively underused tool amongst our generation. Despite the gracious words of my husband... "as long as they don't all start coming to our one and bidding against us for the good stuff", I've decided to utilise that old cliché of 'sharing is caring'... so here are the basic steps for how it works logistically which I hope will give you the confidence to explore this option further...

Reno Budgeting, My Thoughts On19 January 2018Auction, Interiors, Sourcing Furniture, Tips & Tricks Comments

How to furnish your home on a low or non-existent budget

Does anyone else love those kinda interior articles where they pick an expensive 'investment piece' and then source a budget option that is often very similar? I love it when magazines and bloggers try to make their content accessible to people like us who have a realistic budget and can't blow the families' winter shoes and coat budget on a new lamp.Sometimes I find myself getting frustrated though, because even the 'budget option' makes my debit card quiver with anxiety, which, all things considered, is a bit unfair on the author really. Everything is relative and they can't please everyone. I'm sure spending £179 on a coffee table IS a budget option for someone, and, in a similar vein, when I suggest spending £40 on a coffee table as a bargain, others may disagree with me too.With that in mind though, I'd love to let you know about some of our own resources for spending less money as well as sharing a few of our mistakes so you can learn from them...

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...)

DIY Guide, Interiors, Renovating, Before & After22 October 2017Before and After, Front Door, House Exterior Comments

What's that you say? Another blogger blogging about having a blog?!

Well yes, apparently that seems to be the case. Except I'm not sure I would call myself a blogger just yet, the imposter syndrome I am feeling is in full force as I venture to make this post public with everybody. Who knew I've been bustling away behind the scenes, writing blog posts and not even telling anyone about it?!So here we are then, another interiors blog to add to the already over-saturated market of interiors content online. Man am I aware of that! I must confess though, in all my time scrolling on the interweb or scouring social media, I haven't quite come across another interiors blog that totally gets 'me' or our situation, so I thought I'd start one!If you've arrived here from my Instagram, you will probably be well aware we are trying to sell our house. I must confess, we had no idea it would take this long and even our 'worst possible outcome' was that we'd have moved somewhere bigger by Christmas 2017 which is not looking likely whatsoever. Now that, my friends, is a whole other story of which I'll love to tell you one day when I can report a happy ending, but, I did originally set up this blog to document our new house, our new project, the transformation of our 'forever home'.I hope and pray, that one day soon, I will be doing that, sat at my desk in my new office, smugly tapping away at my keyboard, full of energy and beans because the girls FINALLY HAVE THEIR OWN ROOMS AND DON'T WAKE EACH OTHER UP EVERY NIGHT! (I am well aware all my 'energy and beans' will probably then be spent on sanding a staircase, rolling a ceiling, or knocking down a wall but please do let me indulge in a future where I am not tired for one moment.)

Blog15 October 2017Interiors, MotherhoodComment

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