With Spring knocking on the door and a house to get back on the market, we’ve been beavering away at the interior of our home since New Year. Now that we are also seriously looking at other properties to buy, we’re seeing things slightly differently and have realised that if we are to sell, we need to present a house which looks like something new owners could see themselves in. Not our home. So, we’ve been de-cluttering, stripping back, changing colours so that we have a much more neutral and palette. We haven’t stripped away our personality, because we obviously still live here and I certainly don’t want to live in a sterile space. We’ve just focused on making it a little less us. And in The Well Room, this is where we’ve started making the biggest changes.
Our concrete table – which was a beautiful grey colour – had a resin coat applied a few years back, and this changed it completely. Close up, it still looked lovely. The resin highlighted the different tones and it had a beautiful finish – but the colour overall had changed too, and it’s taken us until now to admit that we’ve never really liked it. We also thought that it might be difficult to paint over resin, but we just decided to go for it, by sanding it down and then applying a very good quality soft sheen gloss in white. What a transformation.
The navy floor has had its first undercoat in white. The floor is original stone and therefore a bit uneven in places – as stone flags tend to be – so our original thinking (when we realised that having a wooden floor laid was more problematic than we were prepared to deal with at the time) was to paint it in a dark navy and cover it with rugs. This has been fine for the last four years, but as soon as the table was painted, it was just too dark and uncompromising. So, like with the table, we just went for it and went white. The plan is to top coat it in a very pale grey, the same colour that we have in the living room, so that the two rooms flow, but at the moment we’re just basking in the whiteness. The blue rugs have gone too, now having found a new home in The Snug, and replaced with jute rugs. Again, a huge difference – and with very little effort and expense.
The Well Room should always have been a lovely dining/living room but in reality, when we’ve been doing renovations and DIY, it’s become a glorified storage room for all of the decorating paraphenalia. And so it was never really used, Or loved. Well, that’s all changed. We’ve purchased two children’s wardrobes from IKEA – I know! – but they were just the right size and colour, and a very funky design, so pretty perfect for hiding away coats and bags and trainers and boots. In the other, we’ve stored away all of the excess kitchen “stuff” – blenders, food mixers, casserole dishes, carafes etc – that sat on top of cupboards and shelves just adding to the feeling of clutter. Meaning that in addition to a much better looking Well Room, we also have a much less busy kitchen. Lots of our bits and pieces have also been boxed away – again, a good exercise in de-cluttering but also, subliminally, a start to the packing up – and so what we have in the Well Room now is much more considered and contributes to an overall feeling of calmness.
We’re very used to the glass well cover, but we do realise that some people might be a bit spooked by looking down into – or standing over – a 10 metre drop. So a white furry rug has been bought to sit on top of the glass, leaving enough around the edges, so that the uplighting can still be seen. And, so that the rug does not get stood on, a coconut palm tree in a basket sits in top, creating a green focal point for the room.
We still have work to do in this room. The floor needs to be finished and the walls repainted, but then it’s over to the professionals, as we are finally tackling the bathroom door and the front door. A sliding wooden door will replace the cheap, not very pretty door into our renovated bathroom, and in even more exciting developments, we’ve decided that a new front door is an absolute necessity. These, along with two wooden dining benches in the same wood, will be hopefully made to our specifications, rather than off-the-peg. Spring is definitely shaping up to be a very exciting time and we hope it will springboard us into a very different kind of life…