23
Sadly, that was where the beauty stopped
and although the bones of the house were
lovely it needed a lot of imagination and
attention to make it work properly and for
us. It had lots of poorly connected rooms
and it was painted haphazardly throughout
in magnolia and it also had a particularly
unattractive orange coloured wooden floor.
The light pendants were wrongly placed,
alongside curtains and blinds that were
utterly wrong in every way. We didn’t want
to spend a fortune in updating the space
so we had to be clever where we spent
our money. As the house had many rooms
none of which seemed to have a real
purpose we started working on zoning the
house for how we would be using it.
The first thing I desperately needed to
tackle was the wooden floor. It was stained
an orange coloured varnish which had been
chipped scratched and damaged over the
years and I know would have cost a fortune
to sand down properly and revarnish. So,
we opted to go with the New England feel
of the house and paint them which hugely
complemented the light airy feel I was
going for. We decided the smallest and
darkest room at the back would become
the family snug/tv room, the largest of the
living rooms would become the drawing
room, a playroom off the kitchen for our
son and what was previously an office with
separate back door access became our
large boot room with bespoke carpentry as
we have a dog and it was ideal for dumping
boots and coats etc after long muddy dog
walks.