It’s time to share a bit more detail about the changes we made to our home here in Sussex after we moved down from Glasgow.

Photos in this post are used from the listings when we bought and sold, with kind permission of Mansell McTaggart and Renny Whitehead. (And a few by me, including some phone snaps along the way.)

We’ve lived here for almost 12 years now but we haven’t done much, other than superficial decorating, as we always knew it wouldn’t be our forever home, we didn’t want to spend a lot on it.

The biggest thing we did was to knock through the wall between the kitchen and dining room, blocking up the old dining room door which cost around £2000 in total.

We knew blocking up the door would affect the light into the hall and despite planning to change our front door for a more glazed option all these years, we never did. It really opened up the kitchen and dining room though which made a huge difference to our life here.

We also added a “peninsula” to the kitchen with an extra piece of granite (£400 including installation) and some discontinued kitchen bits we managed to find on eBay for £70! This made a HUGE difference to our kitchen surface space, we do all our food prep and baking on this area and it’s great for setting up drinks at parties too.

We managed to get this done as soon as we moved in as I was already 6 months pregnant with the twins so had a pretty important deadline!

We also refreshed the kitchen & dining room, changing the “Churlish Green” by Farrow & Ball in the kitchen with a more vibrant “Manzanilla Olive” by Valspar.

Here are some snaps taken during the work…

Snaps by Bex showing the green colour change and the new plasterwork.

We left the other walls as they were, Farrow & Ball’s “Pointing”, an off-white shade which is the same in the upstairs bathrooms too.

The rest of the house was very beige when we moved in which was very warm but just not us at all. We painted many rooms including the living room which started off with a beige Farrow & Ball colour (seen below in the original listing photo) which we initially changed to grey with a heather purple feature wall.

It’s now a gorgeous deep green called “Breathe Deeply” from Valspar, with lots of colourful touches, my style has evolved a lot over the last 11 years here! I’m desperate to replace the old grey sofa.

Due to my advanced twin pregnancy at the time, we hired Matt from MRJ Services to do the decorating and he was so good we got him to come back and re-paint the living room and wallpaper the downstairs loo (previously off-white all around) whilst we were on holiday a few years later.

The hall was another F&B beige colour which we changed to Valspar’s “Quiet Interlude”. We kept a lot of natural wood to keep some warmth and of course added colour with artwork.

We changed the master bedroom to Valspar’s “Aged Parchment” with an accent wall behind the bed in Farrow & Ball “Green Blue” (the same sea-green colour as bedroom 4).

Bedroom 4 we didn’t change – it became Nik’s study/the dumping ground. And is where Kalyan is currently “squatting” as he wanted his own room (but we didn’t want to redecorate when we’re about to move).

The spare bedroom was also painted in “Pointing” which we eventually changed to F&B “Hague Blue” which really makes the Sophie Abbott print pop and looks amazing with lots of Bluebellgray touches like the blind, bedding and wallpaper samples as art, plus my fun golden dino.

I’ll share more memories of us in our home in another post. Needless to say, we’re definitely going to miss many things about living here!