recent Renovation blogs
our renovation story so far, in istria…

our renovation story so far, in istria…

Most people, at some stage in their lives, will embark on a renovation project. Whether it’s doing up a corner in the living room or a full blown house rebuild, it will bring its stresses. We did it fairly recently in West Didsbury. What we thought would take a few...

downstairs bathroom reno : update 1

downstairs bathroom reno : update 1

In the year that we have lived in The House, the small downstairs bathroom has gone through a number of changes. It’s not in the most ideal location, being right off The Well Room, which will eventually become another living/dining room. However, we know that we are...

kitchen reno : update 6

kitchen reno : update 6

Oh, didn’t I just end the last renovation blog post on a bit of a high? Loving that the undercoating was about to start in the kitchen, meaning we could almost, but not quite, see the finishing line. Well, the undercoating did start, but we fell at the first hurdle…...

kitchen reno : update 5

kitchen reno : update 5

We think we are now on the final hurdle, kitchen renovation wise. It seems like we’ve been living forever without a decent working kitchen we can call our own – in fact, since we sold our house in West Didsbury, back in January 2017, we’ve been making do in the...

kitchen reno : update 4

kitchen reno : update 4

It’s the weekend, but that doesn’t stop our builders. Give them their due, there’s some work ethic being displayed here! We *think* that the major drilling work might be over for this phase of the house renovation, so whilst Misko & Edin got on with the cabling...

kitchen reno : update 3

kitchen reno : update 3

It’s been a while since I’ve recorded anything about the kitchen renovation, simply because nothing massive – or Instagram worthy – seems to have happened recently. But actually, a lot has happened and we are hopeful that the dirty, grimy work is now almost over. So,...

house reno : stairs : update 1

house reno : stairs : update 1

Who’d have thought stairs could be so problematic? To be honest, I’ve never really given stairs a lot of thought, because they’re just…there. But our stairs need a lot of thinking about, because they’re pretty unusual. We have one set going upstairs from the living...

house renovation : floors

house renovation : floors

Although our house is quite old – we think parts of it are over 200 years old – and is quite traditional in structural style to many of the stone houses in Istria, we are determined to stamp a contemporary feel on it. Apart from The Well Room where the floor is stone...

well, well, well…

well, well, well…

One of the more unusual features of our house is an internal well. A working well, at that – we know when we’ve had a deluge as we can hear the rain water roaring into it. We don’t know how old it is, or whether it was originally built inside the house. Our builder,...

planning the bathroom renovation

planning the bathroom renovation

In the house we’ve bought in Istria, we have two bathrooms. Sounds like a bit of a luxury, doesn’t it? But, both are very small and both are poorly laid out. The house had previously only been used in the summer, and more recently, less frequently, so not a great deal...