Moving house

So possibly one of the most stressful experiences of my life, was moving house 10 days before Christmas! I do not recommend it, unless you have somewhere else to live or someone to stay with, as the pressure of Christmas (and also the whole world shutting-up shop) means it’s pretty tough.

Our first home together was an apartment in a gated development in Salford Quays, Manchester. We were so excited when we picked-up the keys to this place and felt so utterly grown-up and responsible. It was a fantastic location, with a tram-stop downstairs and just 5-minutes into the city centre. We loved it and the apartment served us well. It was 2-bed and 2-bathroom and felt very luxurious with our main bedroom having an en-suite. The Kitchen joined into the open-plan lounge and we even had a juliette balcony with views over Salford Quays and Old Trafford in the distance.

With the addition of our puppy Bobbi and a number of pieces of furniture, we out-grew our little home after a couple of years and decided we should up-scale slightly. Having got married this year and having settled into our jobs properly, we felt that we were happy to make the commitment to stay in Manchester and begin to root ourselves properly. This meant we were ready for our first little house, stairs and all!

Here’s a few pics of our old place…

Main bedroom (during packing-up of course!)

Lounge area

Kitchen

Hallway

And our last evening together in our first home

Onto the new house…

Having done a lot of research and many evenings spent on Rightmove, we settled on Chorlton as an area. Our criteria being: friendly, safe, young professionals, young families, local pub with beer garden, local park, Victorian property. Chorlton has all of these things. It’s a thriving little village in South Manchester, packed full of independent shops, pubs and restaurants…everything a twenty/thirty-something couple would want. There’s plenty of parks in the surrounding area, a green and it’s a stones-throw from large meadows and river walks.

When we came across our house on Rightmove, we knew we had to see it right away. Good properties do not hang around in Chorlton and this seemed to be the right era and packed full of all the original features we both love. Not to mention it was 3-bedrooms and had a cellar and a small back-yard! So we quickly viewed the property over a weekend packed full of viewings. And we loved it straight away. It’s dinky, but perfectly formed and has a great feel to it. Nothing needs doing, but there’s plenty of projects so we can stamp our own personalities on the place. It’s totally liveable, but still enough to do to develop it and add value. And the best bit is, it’s within stumbling distance from one of our favourite pubs and just a few minutes walk to the meadows for Bobbi. Bliss!

After a bit of deliberation, we impulsively put in an offer the next day and asked to see it again. Within 48 hours it was ours!

Fast-forward 3 long, dragging months and we were finally given our completion date (did I mention it was just 10 days before Christmas?!!) and suddenly everything was becoming an exciting reality. Surprisingly, packing-up our old apartment and leaving wasn’t as emotional as I thought it might be – we were ready to go. Fond memories and fairwells. By the afternoon, we finally had the keys to our new house and the moving-in began! Phew.

Needless to say, there’ll be plenty of home posts on here in the coming months, full of the projects we will undertake on our new home, as well as new pieces of furniture we pick-up and design inspiration we find along the way.

To start with, I thought I’d include a few photos of how the down-stairs looks now we’ve moved in slightly and are starting to live in it (excuse the mess). We wanted to get it liveable and comfortable for our first Christmas in our own home, so that was the main priority. We’ll slowly start to tweak things in the New Year and we can’t wait!

I’ll start with my favourite part of the house…the bay window in the lounge

Here’s the view from the adjoining dining room, looking back into the lounge

And another of my favourite features…the fireplace in the lounge

Here’s the view of the dining room from the lounge, with the new addition of our refurbished antique pine dining table and star fairy-lights from Ikea at the window. You can’t see in this photo, but there is a door over to the back-left of the room which leads out to the kitchen and the door-way to the cellar.

Here’s the kitchen. It’s perfectly liveable, but not to our taste, so that’s currently Project Number 1!

With a few candles and a Christmas tree, the place is already feeling cosy and like home. This is enough for the holidays…time to relax (Bobbi is taking it all in her stride)!