Limepaint - what went wrong and why I won't be using it again

Limepaint or limewash is a natural eco-friendly paint which, when applied with a brush, creates a beautiful textured finish and thanks to modern companies like Bauwerk Colour and Kalkliter, comes in a wide range of stunning colours. So why did it all go so wrong?I have loved the look for awhile, whether it be in Moroccan décor or in more contemporary settings and I felt this paint might just be the 'piece de resistance' needed in our bedroom. I like the calming nature of an all-white bedroom but felt by injecting some texture it would help give it depth and interest.

DIY & Crafts, My Thoughts On2 April 2019bedroom, decorating, limepaint, limewash Comments

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!

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...

The Otto House Blog: Interiors and Renovation

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