Our new house!

Lots of photos for you today. You lucky people!

We completed on the house around lunchtime today - yay! It's strange that until this morning it was someone else's home. The people we bought it off have lived there for over ten years. Wonder how they felt to be leaving it.

I pegged it to the estate agents and picked up the keys. I went straight to the house (meeting our adjoining neighbours as I arrived) and ran around the house seeing what it was like. We knew the decor was a bit shabby, but some of it was better than we expected. It was all a little overwhelming.

Anne phoned and I picked her up from work. We had a quick trip to Homebase (me playing the part of Neil Morrissey) and then got started with the work. Look at hard working us! We have Monday and Tuesday off work, and don't need to be out of our flat for a week or two so we have a lot to do before we move in. Many of the walls need some work, but our main priorities before we move in are the lounge and main bedroom. Once those are done we can move in and the rest of the rooms can be decorated while we're living there.

The lounge had blue walls, dark green woodwork, and a dark red ceiling.

I'm not kidding. Seriously. Here's a photo:

You see! The first thing we did was to put some white on the walls and ceiling. Tomorrow we'll finish off the white on the ceiling, do the wood white, and choose a colour for the walls. This room has to be relaxing. It's where my big TV and surround sound system will go. In two weeks I hope to be watching Star Wars on DVD in theis room WITH a sub-woofer (which I was never allowed to have in a flat!)


The garden's packed with bushy plants, and that makes it look quite small. In fact it's not small at all. We intend to hack at the plants a lot to free up some space. We have TWO sheds (like Arthur 'Two Sheds' Jackson in that Monty Python sketch!) Here are some photos of the garden:



Best of all we have fruit. There's an apple tree in the garden:


And there's a "pergola" outside the patio doors with vines growing over it. On the vines I was surprised to see loads of grapes (not quite ripe yet)!


Here's two more photos. First the "family room" (essentially a largish dining room which is joined onto the kitchen):

And then Anne's initial attempts at stripping the wallpaper in the main (master!) bedroom:

So we're tired now (though of course not so tired that I can't do a blog entry). We came back to the flat at 7.30 and ordered a take-away curry. Lovely.

We're very excited about this house, and quite daunted by the work we have to do.