It’s been a year since we’ve moved into our new home in Sydney. Time flies! So far I’ve loved almost every aspects of being a home owner – except for the many bills that come with it: fortnightly mortgage repayments, strata levy, special levy, council rate, water rate etc. It simply never stops! Living in Sydney is very expensive and between the bills, the renovation work and our upcoming wedding in France, the wallet is thinning out! The cost of living in London or Tokyo was comparable I suppose. Luckily according to the Cost of Living Calculator it seems that salaries are the highest in Sydney, so we may not have made a bad choice by settling down here in the end! The hard work will pay out!
In order to make our house more of a home for us, Mr Slimalicious and I have worked very hard over the past twelve months. Even our long awaited Christmas break was sacrificed to sand and paint more walls! It is still very much of a work in progress and no room is quite ready yet (so I won’t be sharing many before/after photos at this stage but hoping to do so within the next 6 months as we are getting closer and closer to the end result).
I must say, we have also been extremely lucky to be selected to take part in a Living Room makeover TV show! If you follow me on Twitter/Instagram, some of you may know it already – it all happened in November/December last year and our exciting experience will be aired on Australian national television on March 7th! Stay tuned! We are not allowed to share photos of the result as yet (it would ruin the surprise), but all I can say is that we are very pleased with the new designer look!
Over the months, I have learnt (the hard way) that renovating your home is so much more than a bit of handy work. It’s also:
- Stripping old dusty things off (like carpet or tiles) and worse is finding out how to dispose of it!
- Finding trustworthy tradies and actually getting quotes out of them after they came to your place to ‘take a look’
- Spending weekends at Bunnings or Ikea and bringing stuff home – like heavy pots of paint – (especially when you don’t have a car!)
- Arguing (for weeks) over which shade of grey you should paint your living room walls
- Watching DIY Youtube videos in the middle of the night
- Removing paint from your playful kitten‘s coat… And so much more fun!
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The only room that is actually 100% complete is the corridor! We replaced the 1970’s original carpet with coffee colour bamboo floating floor boards, fix and paint the skirting boards, sand and paint the walls, replace the light feature).
The next step for us is the start our long awaiting major kitchen renovation in a few days.
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| Good bye 1970’s kitchen! You won’t be missed! |
If you were to renovate your home, what room would you start of with? Why?
The post Making a House a Home: Renovation Update appeared first on Mademoiselle Slimalicious.