A country life for me

So, having found the dream cottage - what next?

I can remember reading articles in the press about how the pandemic was changing peoples lifestyles and wants/needs as far as nesting was concerned. There was a shift to a slower way of life, and a demand for moves to the country.

Usually never one to miss a good bandwagon, am afraid we were ahead of the curve on this occassion. We’d signed on ours, passed the reference checks and paid the deposit!

Now came the hard work - never having rented before, we weren’t too sure of the protocal around the things we wanted to change. Having either owned our home or rented from a landlord who let us do whatever we wanted, we now faced the prospect of living with gilt wall lights and magnolia walls.

But, if you don’t ask, you don’t get, so we asked.....the letting agent who managed the property on behalf of the landlord - and our list was long, very long. And found our new landlord to be very amenable.

We scoured eBay and all the DIY sites to find some plain, paintable wall lights, sourced the Farrow & Ball colours we wanted for feature walls and bought gallons and gallons of white paint and set to work.

We had the good fortune to have time on our side as we had no set leaving date for the old house, and just ourselves pushing us to move in to the new house.

I booked some afternoons off, the odd long weekend and we set to work painting and cleaning the house. The beams in the living and dining room were already painted so we freshened them up, found the perfect colour for the fireplace wall and alcoves and the blue we wanted for the dining room and stairs - leaving just the grey for the kitchen.

My long suffering partner did the majority of the work - hard slog, back breaking, especially when you’re into your 50’s but needs must, and the coffers couldn’t cover a decorator, so DIY is was! There is still something so fulfilling about relaxing at the end of a day of manual labour - take it from one who pushes buttons on a keyboard most of his working day.

The carpet the landlord put down was brand new and neutral enough to stay, and gave a cosy feel to the majority of the house, leaving ceramic tile in the kitchen and connecting bathroom.

While decorating the shell inside, we also looked outside and tidied up the front garden, and painted the newly appointed fence a black stain to match the door. The backyard had black accents so we decided to carry that theme through to there too and painted the existing storage shed and fencing with a fresh coat of black ahead of autumn.

This colour scheme outside was nicely accented by galvanised metal and terracotta pots, holding our plant collection and some welcome new additions. We’d decided to keep the majority of the garden plants to greens, with red Acer accents, and any flowering plants to blues/purples and whites, simple but very effective.

Add a new black outside mailbox and we were pretty much ready to go.

We checked diaries and decided on a moving in date at the end of August - though we would only be moving what we wanted initially. Again, not having a drop-dead leaving date for the old house allowed us to sort and sell things we didn’t want or need. The new buyer for the house took our old pine refectory table, dishwasher and a few other things, we did 2 car boot sales and sold things for silly prices to get rid of them, and sold the books we no longer wanted or needed.

All this went towards moving in and setting up costs.

All sounds idyllic? Not always the case.......see my next piece for more details.