It's always really hard to try and decide where to spend the money when your renovating a house, but what I have found that it's worth having a treat every now and then to boost a room and spur you on, otherwise it feels a bit like your working really hard for nothing, especially as a lot of the big costs go into things you can't see (plastering, electrics, insulation) .
I've tried to do this in every room, the lounge we put in a beautiful fireplace that has been cast from an original Victorian design (http://www.carron.uk.net/carron-fireplaces), the front bedroom, well, to be honest, I went to town on that bad boy, V&A wallpaper, Laura Ashley bed, all new furniture but soooo worth it. I've found as well that shopping around and waiting can significantly reduce the cost of a room renovation. The bed was in the sale and came with a mattress that we didn't need, so I sold it on ebay for £100 which bought the cost of the bed down, the wallpaper was part of a triple nectar points campaign and had 20% off and the furniture was 50% off.
I find that if a plan ahead and watch products, I can often get what I want for a decent amount of discount, plus and I can't stress this enough always buy through topcashback.co.uk, it's free money and a no brainer. I tend to do a click and collect as I object to delivery fees.
I didn't splurge at all on the dressing room as we pretty much had everything we needed bar a set of drawers and a mirror, although I have gone back into this room as it's not working fantastically. I've moved it around and Mr Toon is going to make me a dressing/console table so I'll post a pic of that as soon as its done. As its a functional room, I'm not too worried about how it looks aesthetically, as long as it works for us to get dressed in everyday and I can do my hair and make up and its easy to keep clean and tidy.
I have used carpet tiles on the floor in the dressing room, as they are so cheap and I have a bad habit of dropping make up and my straightening irons. The brilliant thing about carpet tiles is you can just pull the offending one up and either clean it or chuck it away and replace it. The whole room cost £60 and I moved them from the dinning room to the dressing room as I hadn't ordered enough for the dinning room but lived with it for a while until I could get some more. (is this a bit boring or are you still interested, let me know!). I'll put a pic up of the dressing room and you can see what I mean. Mr Toon wanted to do wood click flooring, but I think its really cold and you get dust bumbles in corners in a matter of hours of vacuuming which I hate hate hate!
I have had a massive splurge on the dinning room and have bought and had installed a wood burning stove, and oh my god it's so lush. We paid for the experts to put it in, Mr Toon could have done it, but we would have to have had it independently checked to get the HETAS certificate and it's a real specialist job that if it went wrong would cost a load of money, sometimes with a renovation you just have to pay the experts.
We had to have our chimney stack renovated and our chimney pots refitted as the whole thing wasn't in a good way. This has been the worst thing we have found since we started on the project and luckily for us our neighbour is a roofer and he's done an amazing job.
Everytime the wind blew whilst we were waiting on the work being completed, I was sure the chimney was going to fall down, so its really nice to know its all sorted and save.
The wood burning stove really chucks out a load of heat, and on Saturday we had a covering of snow, but didn't notice the cold in the house as the stove was on and pretty much kept the whole house warm. The real test will be Christmas when we're home all the time.
Now we need to renovate the rest of the dinning room, but we haven't got a clear idea of what we want yet. I use Pinterest a lot to plan the rooms, I have lots of ideas but they haven't come together yet!
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