Summer Decorating

I have toyed with not sharing these pictures but there is not fun in a makeover if you can’t share the before. And frankly, I’ve shared worse.

Over the last few months I have been teaching social media and photography classes at Annie Sloan. Dream job! I get to work with incredible small / medium business owners and share my passions at the same time. Not only that but adding in some extra work has allowed me to save some money to put towards my business and home.

Business first – I bought a new lens and can now take wide angle shots (yay) and secondly, decorating the ground floor of our home. Finally.

We have done a few bits of decorating over the last nine years but so many areas haven’t been touched. There’s even a mark from where our removal man cut his hand the day we moved in. Oh yes, we’re bad.

I wanted to share our sitting room with you first. It’s in the centre of the house and because of the way it’s been extended it only has a tiny West-facing window up high. As such it gets very little light and I often have the light on during the day. I’ve taken these photos at sunset which is about the only time it gets light (and they look a little weird for it!).

We’re going to be keeping it bright in here. At the moment Plan A is to put a warm white on the wooden wall and fireplace and to repaper the wall behind the big sofa.

Plan B would run to us painting the floorboards white / pale grey – the colour of them isn’t quite this ghastly but it’s not far off. They will need to be redone in any case as I’ve worn the varnish away with my laptop table. If not in this session then in the next.

The Billy bookcase is going and the metal shelves are going into that spot which I hope will make it look a little less messy. A girl can dream, right?

I picked out Julia Rothman’s Daydream paper from Hygge & West. I have loved this pattern for years and the white/blue/yellow colourway just sings to my heart.

I’ve been out of love with our paper almost since we put it up so I am looking forward to seeing something different in here. I’ll be stripping the paper this weekend in readiness – not a moment too soon!

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I would really love to replace our sofa. I know it looks so comfy (and we can fit all five of us on it) but as it’s feather-filled it not only gets uncomfortable really quickly but it’s probably not doing my asthma any favours.

I have been crushing on several sofas online to the extent that every time I log into Facebook all of the ads are for sofas. As a responsible home owner I should probably focus on fixing the roof first but I can’t help but imagine a new sofa in the finished room. Which one would you choose?

So this is the first room I’m sharing but we’ll also be painting the kitchen and hallway – there will be plenty of colour going on the walls! We’re going to be using Valspar paint again, thanks to B&Q, and I’ll be going to have the final colours mixed over the next few days.

Goodbye boring magnolia and hello fresh, happy interior!