New Chapters.

Wow.

Well, hello again. It's been a while. But I needed a proper break; not a brief week or two, riddled with the guilty 'I need to blog' feeling. A full no-guilt-focus-on-work-and-personal-life-and-stop-doing-so-much break.

In fact, such was the magnitude of the break that it appears I decided I needed to pile more onto my personal life plate so... OH and I bought a house!

It's in our beloved town of Chorlton which isn't the cheapest place to buy so we knew we were never going to get a bargain but our friends and our much-loved lifestyle are based there and the thought of moving away from it was too much of a wrench for us so we sucked it up and bought up.

It's a 3 bedroom Victorian terrace which I know is most peoples idea of hell ("A terrace?! how small and, er, quaint!") but it's actually my idea of a dream home so I am beyond thrilled with it. Or rather...what it will be.

Right now it's a phenominal mess of a building site but it hasn't dampened our spirits. We are going at it full steam ahead and have 1 month from now to move in. Our evenings and weekends are taken over and we've become almost complete social recluses but we don't care. We need to put hours, days, weeks and months into our bricks and mortar so that's what we're doing.

Here are some pics of the house as it was when we bought it. I'll label them as what they are/will be:

Living Room

Dining room/bar

Kitchen

Our Bedroom

My Dressing Room

Yard

And the day we got the keys:

And here are a few pictures of it last week. I'll try to do it in the same order but if I don't succeed I'll label these too:

Living Room

Dining Room / Kitchen / Bar

Kitchen (knocked through to Dining Room)

Our Bedroom (mid-fireplace restoration)

My Dressing Room

I know - it's not nice. And it's not pretty. But it will be and we won't rest until we have it matching the vision in our minds. This was last week - we now have a lot of plastering done and even some initial paint work:

Our Bedroom

Our Bedroom

My Dressing Room

Stairs and Landing Plastering

As you can see, in our bedroom we've decided to restore the old fireplace which I cannot wait for. We've not taken a small amount on; we've had the house just over a month now and the progress we've made has been nothing short of back-breaking but we're seeing results every day. This weekend the french doors go in the back of the dining room to lead out to the yard and the floors upstairs are my project to sand and re-stain and varnish.

Pinterest is currently being an enormous help - if you want to see some of my inspiration pins follow me. I'm 2dyeiv - just click to see my boards and follow me.

So - that's where I've been. But I have been asked so many times about the build and the interior decoration side of things that it's given me the oomph I needed to get back on here and share it with you.

I hope you like it and will continue to follow my progress as we move forward with this gargantuan project.

Happy Tuesday!