We moved in December 2016 and lived in a sea of boxes for months. Doesn’t everyone? But our start was extra bonkers because the quickest way to get things sorted was to all sleep together downstairs on the sofa bed for the first few weeks while I decorated upstairs.
This was hard going because we had so many boxes that even the living room was piled to the ceiling. Kindly the removals guys were thoughtful enough to unfold the sofa bed first, so we did have somewhere to sleep. Every other inch was covered in boxes.
Over the coming weeks, I blitzed the bedrooms with help from friends and family. I also bravely had a tree surgeon friend take down one of the two tall fir trees in the garden because it was blocking the summer house. We moved into our rooms and unpacked the other rooms a bit and started planning.
The kitchen and patio were falling apart, so it seemed logical to crack on with a rear extension and kitchen straight away. I sat down with architect Max Dewdney and designer Jonathan Maker, along with my trusty builder Mick the Brick, and we started to design it.
I went through a few versions of the design with Max. The plan was always to knock the dining room and kitchen together and then extend backwards to build a large, open-plan space. But over the course of the revisions, we changed the shape of the roof, the footprint of the extension and more.
