A Blank Canvas

It’s here! Moving day!

Well…truth be told we’ll probably move over the next week – the power at the new house isn’t connected until Monday, and we’ve got a pretty nice comfortable roof over our heads at my mum’s house (which is just a few kilometres around the road).

But…tomorrow is officially moving day! Obviously, I am fairly useless (don’t worry I promise not to lift anything or exert myself beyond reasonable measure) so we’ve enlisted the help of our two super helpful and lovely friends, especially to help Matt with the heavy furniture lifting. So, so, so grateful, we simply couldn’t do it without them as moving weekend happens to be the weekend my mum has flown off to Nepal and Matt’s parents are in New Zealand. Eeeek!

As I’ve promised to lots of people, here is our new home in all its bare, empty, blank canvas glory…

When we lived here in 2010/2011 things looked a little lot different – there was a wall in between the lounge and the kitchen, as well as the hallway being more enclosed. Your standard rabbit warren of rooms in an older home. The lounge room was also covered in dark, dark (almost black) brown plywood paneling. It was a total cave (a very cosy in Winter cave though). The wood heater is a great one, but it used to do a great job of making the lounge room sweltering and the bedrooms freezing! Now with the walls removed it should be an efficient house to heat.

The hallway had the same dark wood treatment, which is now no longer. It also had a big linen cupboard which was the only storage in the house, but now that space has become a shower in the bathroom. Yeah…no bath in this house. You win some, you lose some. You can see in the image above where the walls used to be (from the bulk heads in the ceiling which remain).

The kitchen is in a very similar configuration to before but is all new now, basic but new. The house has been used in the past few years as a farm stay/b&b set-up so the kitchen was intended for little storage, no pantry. Once upon a time we did live in the world’s tiniest kitchen in our little cottage though, and honestly it was the most useful kitchen space I’ve ever had! I’ll keep reminding myself of that. No doubt I will miss my big farmhouse kitchen from ‘Carlton’ (and the huge pantry!) but smaller/no storage really makes you assess all ‘the stuff’, which can only be a good thing I feel.

Off the lounge room is a sun room, a standard later addition to homes of this era (essentially just enclosing the original verandah). When we used to live here we used this as a dining room, as the wall dividing the lounge and kitchen didn’t allow for dining table space. Now with the open living/dining/kitchen space this can be used as a sitting room/my office/kids space as I always envisaged. I really like the idea of having an area that’s not our main living space for kids, an area without a TV and I’ve always liked having my desk and computer nearby rather than squirreled away.

The old external laundry has been demolished, with the laundry now housed in the little room off the back porch which used to be my sewing room. The bedrooms are all fairly standard – master, nursery and what will be my sewing room/Matt’s study. We were totally spoiled for space in the limestone farmhouse with very generous bedrooms, the bedrooms here are by no means small but what I did have envisaged for the nursery has been downscaled somewhat (we still want to keep a spare bed in there for visitors or just a handy space to lie with baby). My sewing room will be majority just that, rather than majority Matt’s study as it used to be, mainly because Matt has an office elsewhere now and won’t need a desk etc. at home.

So…that’s it! Our new home. Our old home. Confused? It’s all a bit of a bizarre situation and a lot of mixed feelings being back here…same same but different. We’re excited and relieved to finally be settled again in a home of our own (somewhat), we’re both total homebody nesters at the best of times so living out of bags and boxes for the past two months while we’ve been either baby growing or settling into a new job hasn’t been ideal.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have some lemon meringue cheesecake to make to thank our fabulous moving helpers. I pay in cheesecake, don’t you?