I cannot believe that we have lived here two years already. We have lived with our tiny kitchen, that we took into what was advertised as a ‘spare’ bedroom, to give us room. We have lived with the queuing system when manoevering backwards and forwards to the fridge through the doorway. We have toyed with having the boiler, which is in a cupboard beside said doorway, moved. We have toyed with building an extension, we have almost driven ourselves nuts.

We have lived free of loans, credit cards, and mortgages for eight years now. Having read the Tao we realised just how much those things stop you living in the here and now, and that is for another post. But we have decided against an extension, we are going to be clever with the space we have. So yesterday we started, again. This will be the 4th house RD has renovated, my 6th! When we moved to Montaigu we said we had one house left in us, and despite a very limited budget we made it into a beautiful home. I think it’s safe to say that RD and I are homemakers.

Now the three main things we wanted to change was to make the living room bigger, make the kitchen bigger, and make the bedroom bigger, without an extension. The main thing is that we have three doors in our living room, one to the stupid narrow hallway, one into the kitchen, and one into our bedroom that hit the wall and never fully opened. Years ago there was door from our bedroom into the ‘back room’, as it will now be called. Yep, we are knocking it back through into the back room, freeing up the door from the living room into our bedroom. Instantly that will give us two to three square meters in the living room, and one and a half in the bedroom.

So my old workstation, yes I have been sitting on a barstool for over a year, has come down, furniture has been rearranged and the work has begun.

Good job we are not afraid of hard work and disruption. You have to go through the pain to get the gain.

More to come…

Rosie