GREEN FINGERS

DAZZLING MEDLEY Freedom printed velvet Kilim patchwork pattern, £17.99m, Yorkshire Fabric Shop ‘I have a lot of plants – the pots are from charity shops, supermarkets and Homesense’

GRAPHIC GREY Nazca furnishing fabric, £15m, John Lewis & Partners

but we couldn’t move until August as the owners weren’t expecting to sell so quickly, and hadn’t found a house to move to. During that time, when we were excited and eager to make it our own, we used to bundle our son into the car in the evenings and drive by the property like a pair of house stalkers, daydreaming about the day we’d all move in!

Room rejig

There was a lot to love about the property and it had endless potential, but it still needed a fair amount of work before it could comfortably accommodate our lifestyle. It was built back in the early 1900s, so wasn’t designed with modern living in mind. This meant that the downstairs layout, which was quite impractical, didn’t work for us at all. The kitchen was nice enough and had been finished to a high standard, but it had a really unusual flow, with a utility-cumshower room at the back, and an old glass ceiling that made the room baking in the summer and freezing in winter. Our dream was to be able to open up doors onto the garden for when the weather’s warm and the sun’s out, and to have a much larger area to cook and entertain in.

Layout revisions

We originally toyed with the idea of knocking down walls and enlarging