Have you ever found yourself in a situation where something you’ve always dreamed of is finally happening and the reality is NOTHING like you thought it would be?
That’s what’s happened to me in the last three months, hence the fact I was somewhat MIA from my blog.
We have a new house! (yay!) And it’s a very old house (more yay!) It’s one of those houses that needed so much work done to it it could have been an inexhaustible source of stories for my blog. I could have written endlessly about moodboards, shared before and afters, asked you guys help with choices that needed to be made, diy tutorials and so on and so on. Has it always been my dream to do a cute little house up, document the process meticulously as I went and create something inspiring to share with others? Yes, it has.
So three months ago, when I first walked into that 1911 built dark and abandoned terrace house which we were going to turn into our new splendid house, taking photos and write about everything little action we took surely was the first thing I did, right?
Wrong.
We had 24 hours to make the decision whether or not to accept the offer of this place (has something to do with a complicated Dutch system). And since we were moving from a ridiculously 190 m2 big flat to this in comparison slightly minute one bedroom terrace, moving our stuff over would not be the only thing that needed doing. And did I mention the new house was disgustingly neglected? We had a period of 4 weeks to renovate the new (but very old!!) house, to buy / source / build and make new furniture since everything in the old house was too large. One of my friends who came to house/rabbit sit in our old flat once lovingly refers to our old sofa as ‘that couch on steroids’. So I had to sell almost everything I owned, which wasn’t easy by the way, since I hand made most of my furnishings and each single item has some sort of emotional meaning to me. I also didn’t want to make the time sensitive situation reduce any potential profit and so I hustled, negotiated and online listed my ass off. Four weeks to plough through my three year’s worth of ‘I-have-a-massive-flat-anyway-so-why-not-collect-this-clutter’. Four weeks to rip out floorboards, lay all the flooring, do the painting, the plastering. Four weeks to build, clean, sand, fill and paint every inch of that old and dark house. Four weeks to arrange finances, process address changes, to look for bargains and find ways of sourcing new furniture that would actually fit our new life style.
I was completely overwhelmed by everything involved in the process. And the fact almost anything in the house that could break, leak or crumble actually broke, leaked and crumbled didn’t help either.

This is the very first photo of the house, I took it with my iphone on the day we had the viewing. As you can see, it was a shit hole.
To make a long story short: I didn’t blog AT ALL.
So the coming months I will dedicate my blog posts to our new/old little do up house in a ‘in hindsight kind of way’. My stories will mostly be throwbacks to the pain splats, the struggles we faced, the problems and challenges we encountered and the little triumphs.
Even though most of the big and structural work is done, there are still quite some things in the house that need doing. And since my cortisol levels have returned to normal, I might even find the time to sit down and share some projects with you as they are happening. Who knows.