The Problem with Living in your Dream House….

I absolutely love our house. Love, love, love it. It’s genuinely my dream house and I still have moments where I look around and can’t quite believe we live here. But it’s also more than 100 years old and, as beautiful as it is, it needs a lot of work.

We knew that before we bought it. We sat down after we first viewed it and had a very honest conversation about what we were taking on. We knew it would take years to get it how we wanted it and we were completely fine with that. There wasn’t a single room in the house that didn’t need some sort of work when we moved in, so we definitely went into it with our eyes open.

When we first moved in, we focused on the jobs that actually needed doing straight away rather than trying to make every room look finished. There were a few things that just couldn’t wait, so we dealt with those first and accepted that plenty of other bits could sit on the list for later.

I think that’s one of the things I’m having to get used to with this house: a room can be “done for now” without ever really being completely finished.

There’s so much done and so much still to do

It isn’t that I’m stressed or unhappy with the house because I’m really not. I love it more now than I did when we bought it and I can see so much potential everywhere I look. The problem is probably that I can see so much potential everywhere I look. 😂

I notice every little thing that still needs doing and immediately want to sort it. I don’t love the house any less because it isn’t finished, but I do find it hard to switch off from constantly thinking about what we could do next. I genuinely feel like I haven’t sat down since we moved in, and my partner is exactly the same. There always seems to be something we could be painting, sanding, fixing, moving, buying or planning.

The dining room is probably the best example of how my brain works with the house. Since we moved in, we’ve had the ceiling replastered, restored the fireplace, replaced the light fitting, painted the walls, replaced the curtains, had the chimney swept, and sanded the doors. When I write that down, it sounds like loads, and it is loads, but when I stand in the room my brain immediately notices everything that still needs doing instead.

We still need new flooring, whether that ends up being carpet or restoring the original floorboards. We have some old shelves ready to go up, but they need painting first. There’s an old Victorian cupboard in the corner that needs some love, and at some point we’d like a new sideboard that works better with the table. Somehow the room can feel massively improved and nowhere near finished at exactly the same time, and every room in the house seems to have its own version of that list.

Our priority list changes constantly

We do try to prioritise, but project houses don’t always seem to work like that. Sometimes something suddenly jumps right to the top of the list because we find an amazing bargain, and once that happens the sensible order we had in our heads goes straight out of the window.

Our fireplace is the perfect example. We weren’t actually planning to do anything with that room yet, but then we found a gorgeous fireplace surround at a bargain price and suddenly the whole thing took over. Of course, once we had the surround, we needed a fire to go with it, and just like that we were spending time and money on a room that wasn’t even supposed to be on the list.

I don’t regret it at all because I love how it turned out, but it does show how quickly plans can change when you’re renovating an older house. Sometimes you have to grab an opportunity when it comes up, even if it means something else gets pushed further down the list.

Sometimes we just get distracted

Then there are the jobs that happen purely because we get excited. One day we were sitting outside talking about an old, completely defunct water feature in the garden and wondering whether it could ever work again. Ten minutes later we were both elbow-deep in a muddy hole trying to figure it out.

Somehow, we actually managed to get it going again and brought the old water feature back to life. Obviously, once it was working, we decided it needed some slate around it to make it look nicer, and that somehow led to buying more bits for the rest of the garden too. None of it had been on the plan for that day, but that’s also part of the fun of having a house like this.

Sometimes we discover something old and forgotten and get completely carried away trying to bring it back to life. Those are probably some of my favourite jobs, even if they do completely derail whatever we thought we were going to be doing next.

We don’t want to rush the furniture either

Before we moved in, we decided that we wanted the furniture we bought to feel sympathetic to the house. We actually sold quite a lot of our IKEA furniture before the move because we knew it just wasn’t going to feel right here, and we didn’t want to fill every room quickly just for the sake of having it finished.

That doesn’t mean everything has to be antique or expensive, but we do want things to look like they belong. So instead of just ordering something new every time we need a piece of furniture, we spend a lot of time looking around vintage shops, browsing Marketplace and waiting until we find something that feels right.

That obviously takes longer, and we could probably have every room fully furnished by now if we’d just bought the first thing that fitted the space. But I don’t think we’d be as happy with it, and that’s another strange part of the overwhelm. I want everything finished, but I also don’t want to rush it and end up filling the house with things we don’t really love.

We still want to actually live our lives

There’s also the fact that I was poorly for a big chunk of the first half of this year, so naturally things didn’t move as quickly as they might have done otherwise. And even now, we don’t want every spare minute to be spent working on the house because there’s more to life than sanding doors and choosing paint colours.

We want holidays, weekends away, days out, time with family, evenings doing absolutely nothing and sunny afternoons sitting in the garden. We bought this house to live in, not so that every weekend for the next five years had to become one long renovation project.

So there has to be a balance. Some weekends we’ll get loads done and some weekends we’ll do nothing at all. Sometimes we’ll spend money on the house and sometimes we’ll decide the money is better spent on something fun. 

I think I need to stop trying to fast-forward

I think that’s really what all of this comes down to. I knew before we moved in that this house would take years, and I was completely happy with that, but now I’m actually living here I keep wanting to fast-forward to the bit where everything is finished.

I need to get better at noticing how much we’ve already done instead of always looking at what’s next. The house doesn’t need to be perfect now, and actually I think part of the fun is going to be looking back in a few years and remembering how gradually it all came together.

And maybe that’s the real point of it all. Not a perfectly finished house, not a never-ending to-do list, but a home that slowly evolves with us as we live in it. One that changes, grows, gets better bit by bit… and is still ours in every stage along the way.

Despite all the unfinished jobs, the lists, the bargains that derail our plans and the random muddy garden projects, there’s one thing that never changes. We’ll go out somewhere, come home and pull up outside the house and I fall in love with it all over again every single time. It just doesn’t get old.

I’d love you to follow me on Twitter and it would be amazing to see you over on my Facebook page and on Instagram. If you’re interested, you can find out more about me here and while I’ve got your attention, if you’re wondering why some of my posts lately are a little bit less frugal then have a read of this post. 😉

Do your future self a favour – Pin this post for later.