House projects

Posted on: 3 February 2022

You know what it's like when you move into a new home. As you've crawled through the house buying process, your creative juices have been bubbling away with what you're going to do to your new blank canvas. The possibilities are endless. You move in, you get settled, you spruce a few things up, but soon enough, inertia sets in. Maybe this doesn't sound familiar to you, but this is an accurate account of my current situation. Enter, 2022.

Your home facilitates your life. It is literally the furniture in your life, and - if you're fortunate - one of the few reliable and comfortable constants in your life. Because of this, you can easily take it for granted and things can become stale and complacency can grow.

There's tonnes of things this year I want to do to improve my home. Both functionally, and aesthetically. My 3 to get my going are as follows:

Install a catflap

We've been in our current house 14 months and still our poor cat Chester has to scratch on the door or come and find us to be let in and out. And cats like to come in and out a lot. I will likely end up getting a professional in to do this, but I'm counting it as a house project.

Improve the lighting

Shamefully, we still have bare bulbs hanging in the majority of our rooms. And in most cases, you can do a lot better than overhead lighting for creating a nice mood in a room. Good lighting goes a long way to improving the feel of a room, and my plan is to research and improve our lounge lighting, as a starting project.

Declutter my office

Again, it's a little shameful a room I redecorated less than a year ago requires a declutter. But truthfully, it was never properly organised first time round. I would love to make my office a fresh and minimal space for optimal creative thinking.

Fit a heatpump

This one is a big (expensive) one. Our boiler is over 10 years old and on the blink. I don't want to replace our old combi like-for-like, and I'm big into the concept of renewable heating solutions. Government schemes have made fitting a heatpump affordable, and most companies offer a free consultation to see if it could work for you. So, there's really no excuse not to explore this route.