[Check out part 1 and part 2, if you haven’t read them already.]

With the carpet down, it meant that we could finally move a few things back into the front room (which we did later that afternoon).

We also brought down some boxes from the loft, which contained a load of flat packed bookcases that we had ordered back in January (cos it was my birthday and Ikea hadn’t opened yet). It took a while to actually build them all, but it was so much nicer than the random book cases and shelves we had there before.

At the same time, we also ordered in some blinds. We did the blinds ourselves in the two bedrooms we decorated, so this should be fine. Although bay windows are a bit awkrard as you have to the know the size of the blinds, to know how big the blinds need to be. Fortunately the company provides you with a guide on how to fake it with some cardboard. And it basically worked.

As well as my birthday, we also had Kate’s birthday whilst we were decorating, and we got a couple of terrariums to put around the house.

This enclosed one came from a shop in Exeter called Hutch, that we really like, and it’s doing really well.

It took a while but we got all of the shelves up and drilled them all together, and pleasingly found that we had some space left of some of the shelves (partly because the book case is bigger, and aortly becasue we have kept some of our junk of the old book cases that are now upstairs). A perfect excuse to buy more book (and more Lego).

Nice organised book cases means we finally got all of our books together, inludin the many garden/planting/growing/foraging books.

Oh, and we finally got rid of the horrible table that the previous occupant left behind. It was nice to see the back of it partly cos it was old and skanky, but also because we had no dining room whilst decorating, so we had to resort to eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in the kitchen with a couple of the old chairs. Not only was this difficult, but it took up what little room we have in the kitchen anyway, so when we finally got the new table in, and the old chairs got taken to the recycling centre, the kitchen felt massive! (It didn’t last long, it feels tiny again now).

The table was nice and simple and the wood and differnt coloured chairs all matched in with the decor of the new rooms. And despite trawling around all of the furniture shops over the May Day bank holiday weekend, we ended up going with John Lewis, as it was the only one we saw that wasn’t completely awful.

It still needs a few finishing touches, maybe a few more pictures and definitely a clock, but it’s 1000x better than it was before.

When we get a few more things added in, we’ll post another update.