I love our house – it’s ideal for us, being situated in a market town in the countryside half way between where we both work; has more than enough space for both of us and the cats (in fact, we joke that we can take a bathroom each!) and for my clothes and sewing room; it has a small garden and a lovely garden. We’ve been living here for just more than 2 years now; before that we were renting together for almost 5 years, so fortunately when we were house hunting, we had a really good idea of what we wanted and didn’t want in a house.
When we moved from our uni flat, the only stipulations we had (apart from location) was that it had stairs to go up to bed, some carpeted floors and a small outdoor space – these were things that we missed a lot when we lived in a little flat!
When we moved out of that house into our next rented one, we’d grown up a bit and had more ideas of what we wanted – a bigger/nicer kitchen, a garden with grass, 3 bedrooms (we’d had 2 before) and a nicer bathroom. We found all of these things in a lovely house, but after 18 months renting there and realising we were ready to settle in the area (back in North Yorkshire, not too far from where we’d grown up but far enough away that we were building up our own connections), we started looking at a house to buy.
Our stipulations for this house were fairly similar to our last rented one: a garden with grass (but less overrun than the last – it was pretty wild!), 3+ bedrooms, a nice kitchen, and we didn’t want too much work to do on it.
And fortunately we found one that was perfect – it had everything we wanted and more: 4 bedrooms – room for a sewing room, a spare room and a storage room at the moment! – en suites in two of them, a gorgeous garden room, a garden that’s just the right size and amount of work and a garage. Plus it’s pretty much new build, with only one set of owners before us. The only unfortunate is that they had an odd taste in paint colours!
So if that’s how I feel about our home, why am I writing a post on my “dream home”?! Basically, because I think there’s always going to be room for improvement! We’re always watching home programmes on TV and picking out what we’d love to have in our house. I mean, ideally the house would be huge and have swimming pools, a kitchen the size of a small house, lawns for days…that’s why I’ve said “affordable” ;D
First up, I’d have a kitchen with a breakfast bar or big island, leading into a diner in a garden room with skylights and big patio doors letting in all the light. This is our number one big plan to have in a future home – one day! I even talked about it here. We love cooking and spending time in the kitchen, and ours is currently quite dark so light is hugely important.
In our house now, we have two evening sitting areas – the living room (which leads into the dining room) and the garden room. In our old house, we also had two – the living room again, and a snug (I talked about it here). We love the idea of having somewhere different to retire to on an evening, and having a cosy snug was lovely. In a future home, we’d definitely have a hygge-inspired snug full of cosy chairs, blankets, rugs, cushions, candles and fairy lights – and because I can’t resist, here’s a wishlist of a few things I’d fill it with:
Cox & Cox Sheepskin rug
Zara Reed DiffuserOur bath in our current house also isn’t ideal. It’s not a problem at all, but it’s smaller than our old one and I’d got used to having a big one! I have baths several times a week, so it’s something that’s really worth it for us.
I’m always going to want a few extra bedrooms – a spare room for guests, one for a sewing room and ideally an extra one too, just because! But in addition to that, I’ve got a new thing I’d like. I’d love to have an additional space that could be used for solely for yoga. It’s really tricky to find space in our house to yoga – I can set my mat down anywhere, but it’s not necessarily a quiet space and cats will crawl on me, Ben will step over me, I’ll have to move a table so I don’t hit it…
Ideally I’d have an outdoor garden room of some sort with big doors that let in lots of light so that it’s peaceful and light.
And one last thing – another outbuilding, for an Airbnb space! Since doing our road trip where we stayed in Airbnbs around England, we’ve thought it would be awesome to have our own one day. Not sure if I actually would like it in the end, but it would be fun to try!
What would your dream home be like?
