“Buying a new house” – Decorating!

If everything works out as planned, in two weeks time we will be moving house…

I’m so excited!

The one thing I am most excited about is the whole decorating stage at the beginning. Before we unpack all our boxes and put all the furniture together again, we’re going to have to get some paint and some brushes and give the house some colour and character! (I’ve got nothing against “magnolia” colour, but it gets a bit too boring after two minutes looking at it, so imagine living 24/7 with it! It’s a no, I’m afraid)

I still don’t have a very clear idea in my head of what I want in each room, but these are some rough ideas:

Kitchen and utility room:
The kitchen is already fitted, so we don’t have to worry about the cupboards and stuff. However, the tiles are very plain and we’re going to have to add some colours with other items to give a bit more “life” to the room. I’ve seen a very very cute set of curtain styles for the utility room, but I’m not sure I should also put the same fabric in the kitcken because of two reasons:
1) I haven’t touched/felt the fabric and I don’t know if the material would be suitable for a kitchen (you need special materials that will cope with all the steam and maybe grease as well)
2) I want the curtain in the kitchen to somehow match the dining room one as well. They don’t necessarily have to be the same pattern, but the must match in style. These below are the ones I was thinking for the ultility room curtain.

Dining room:
As I said above, I still haven’t thought much of the colour scheme, but as long as it is fresh and lively I am happy. Green (a pistachio o lime shade of green ideally) is the colour that firstly comes to mind, but turquoises and aqua blues are a possibility too.

Living room:
We have three lovely windows to dress and I don’t mind what colour scheme we follow here. We’ve had a deep red scheme in Byfleet and I’d like to try some other colour. I think that I would like dark wood furniture and very light wall paint. With this combination I would also need curtains that stand out, so maybe a deep purple o darkish blue would be nice.. But, once again, nothing has been decided yet. This is an example of a “bold” curtain that I wouldn’t mind in the living room:

Needless to say, all soft furnishings will be matching the curtains!

Study:
We have already agreed to reuse the curtains that we already have in the first floor of the new house. I believe that the ones we have in the bedroom now will be going into the study. That means a blue, brown and beige scheme. Sounds good to me.
For the desks, we have seen a good set of desk and chairs (that hopefully will fit two off) at Ikea:

Second bedroom:
I think we have secretly decided to go for white furniture in this room, as we saw a very nice day bed / sofa at Ikea in white that we both liked. The curtains in this room will be dark green, yellow and orange, and if we’re going to have white furniture, I think we’re going to have to go for a bold colour in the walls. However, since it’s a very small room already, I am not sure if we should. We all know that dark paint make rooms look smaller. So this one is one to think carefully. Would something like this be okay?:

Master bedroom:
I think this is going to be the easiest, as we will be reusing the living room curtains that have a nice deep red wine colour. We will only have a “feature wall” in that colour (and probably not even a big one so it doesn’t overpower the rest of the room), and the rest of the red tones will come with other objects like paintings, pictures, etc.

Bathrooms/Toilet:
The wall and floor tiles are a browny/beigy colour, so the towels and mats will have to be in the beige/mocha side of colours… Maybe something along these lines:

So, yeah, that is the big plan! We don’t have a huge budget anyway, so we will have to play it by ear and try to get the best deals that we can. We’ll be buying our decorations in Wilkinsons rather than Laura Ashley and all those sensible things that we, tight and stingy people, do