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New Home Tour
This post was sponsored by Desenio.
It’s been almost a year since we moved into our house.
Typing that out I can’t quite believe it. It feels like only yesterday we were fretting about whether the sofa would fit through the door, and now here I am, feet up on the coffee table with tea and biscuits in tow, older and only very slightly wiser. The year has flown by in a flurry of boozy sleepovers, room rearrangements and "yes Keiran, another new mug", but throughout the process of trying to make this house our home, I've always favoured a good print or two.
Despite the fact that most of the walls were hideously painted in pillarbox reds and sickly sweet pinks when we arrived, our landlord asked us to keep the decorating fairly neutral (landlords, eh?), so we went the predictable Millenial route and doused the house in white. The only room that escaped our wrath was the hallway, and that was solely because Keiran had grown sick of painting and I wasn't tall enough to reach the tops of the walls (if you ever notice some crazy black and white wallpaper in my Instagram Stories, this is why! Not my personal choice, as I'm sure you can imagine).
All white is great for making the rooms feel larger and encouraging them to be light and open, but it also runs the risk of being a bit bloody bland. We're lucky enough to live in an old Victorian property with gorgeous feature fireplaces and big, tall ceilings, and again, whilst this means the rooms feel really spacious and kinda fancy, it also means there is a ~ lot ~ of wall space to fill.
Disclaimer: I am by no means an interior designer. I'm not even very good at taking interior images, as I expressed to Hannah with an exasperated arm fling when she came over to help shoot. We both agreed that Kate Lavie has got it down - she's just a genius - but until I can master that level of having just enough stuff to look homely, but not too much stuff to look cluttered, you guys will have to deal with the corners of my house that don't look like a crap-heap (not very many, at this moment in time).
Grab 25% off posters between today (April 24th) and Thursday April 26th by using the code 'thelittleplum' at checkout. This doesn't include handpicked/collaboration posters or frames, sorry!
But hey! This is a home. A real, functioning home for two busy twenty-somethings who prefer to spend what little free time they have inhaling rich tea biscuits and doing other things which I can't mention in a sponsored post. Our house gets messy and dusty, and what you don't see in all of these pictures is the giant pile of muddy shoes I had to move, or the stringy cobweb I discovered whilst venturing to the corner of my dining room for the first time in ages. I wanted some cute pics though, so I'm sure you'll forgive me.
Anywho, after a week or so of uhhming and ahhing, we recently decided to swap our living room and dining room around. Our living room was previously in the largest downstairs reception area (I don't normally say 'reception area', but I'd said 'room' one too many times okay), and our dining room towards the back of the house.
Whilst I loved the big bay window at the front and it seemed logical to pop the sofas in the room with the most space, it ended up feeling like we just couldn't decorate it properly. Without extra chairs the sofas felt too bare, but with the extra chairs it felt cluttered, and in the end it felt a bit intrusive having people walk by whilst we were trying to relax in the evening (probably didn't help that our curtains weren't quite big enough and only met in the middle with extreme difficulty, but hey ho). On the flip side, when we actually had enough people round to trim the dining table, there wasn't enough space for everyone to easily move about.
Now we've made the change I feel so much better about how the spaces are used. The living room now feels like more of a snug, and I don't even mind that 9 times out of 10 someone ends up lounging on the floor because we've run out of seat space. It's cosy and warm, private and safe. Much like every other blogger on the planet, I love expressive line drawings and simple illustrations, so I scoured the art prints on Desenio looking for some new wall art to fill the empty spaces. I opted for three oak Moebe frames in the A3 size, and filled them with Smoking Girl (21x30, left), Strokes in Black (21x30, middle) and Close (21x30, right). I then moved my Gaze (30x40) poster over to the shelf above the TV, along with Hands (30x40), both in simple white frames.
Now we've moved most of the furniture out, the space in the dining room has really opened up and the table we bagged from eBay (there's a link in my old dining room tour here) has become the centerpiece. Adjusting which bits should go where has taken a little time and we're still in the process of seeing what fits, but my Mum dragged up an old fireplace cover from the cellar to break up the expanse of flat white wall, and we've kept our (*cough*my*cough) beloved West Elm mirror in the corner for a little bit of interest.
Print wise, I've gone botanical in this room. I'm really into my deep greens and natural woods at the moment, so I opted for Dark Green Palm Leaves No2 (50 x 70) on the left, and Forest Bridge (50x70) on the right. Forest Bridge already features a white border so I picked up a Passe-partout in white for the leaves, and although the edges are slightly different, I kind of like that they aren't perfectly matched. They're a bit odd, like us. I've just popped them in simple black frames for now, but I think it works quite well with the other smatterings of black in the room.
Let me know what you think of the switch and the prints I've chosen. I best be going to clean up that pile of shoes (or could I just wait and see if Keiran does it first?...).