Making it up as I go

Now I think I've mentioned that we'd only seen the interior of the house once before we bought it - meaning that I did not have the luxury of measuring the rooms and planning where to put the furniture before moving day. 

All of this means that I've developed a new skill - I call it dancing with furniture. The objective of the dance is to find the room lay out that allows us to use the room in the manner that we've planned. Why don't I use a paper plan? Because believe it or not, with the furniture piled in the centre of each room by the movers, it was actually easier to just move it into position until I found a lay out that works and that I like from all viewpoints. 

Downstairs is mainly open plan and was pretty easy to sort with large rooms and plenty of windows. The only real restriction is the traffic flow to the doors, stairs, conservatory etc. 

Upstairs is very different. The cottage is two hundred years old and it has been extended at least three times. The upstairs rooms are very long and narrow which means that they are awkward to furnish. 

Oh how I missed access to my online design resources! Sadly, by this time we'd had the land line connected but the broadband was less than a quarter of the capacity that we'd had before and nigh on impossible for us both to use together. Time to order fibre! But fibre was not going to be available in the village for a while....

So now, it is a few weeks later, we have fibre and I'm an expert in dealing with narrow rooms!