Renovating Our Little Sussex House

Keenan and I have been living in our little house for about 18 months now and we still love it as much as we did the first day we moved in – probably more, even. In fact, we’ll often just be sitting around and one of us will turn to the other and say “I love this house so much”. However, I will admit that sharing a studio apartment is not always easy. For one thing, I can’t escape the noise when Keenan is watching football, which feels like almost every night of my life. Also, it’s pretty hard to heat a space that’s 65m square, 1,5 volume, and all windows, tiles and concrete. So we’ve decided to renovate.

We’re lucky in the sense that our space is rectangular, not square, so we’ve been able to create definite “spaces” within the studio; kitchen area, office space, living area, bedroom. So it feels more like a home than a studio.

Now we’re planning to separate our bedroom completely, by installing floor to ceiling metal windowpanes with a door, and we’re elevating the bed, to create a mezzanine sleeping space above and a bedroom/walk in closet/second living space below. We decided on windows instead of a brick wall, because we didn’t want to make the space feel small or dark, and we wanted to keep the effect with the huge windows we currently have.

The house is not quite double volume (it’s 3,3m from floor to ceiling), so the mezzanine is only going to be for sleep. We’ll be able to sit up in bed comfortably, but we won’t be able to stand up and walk around up there. But downstairs, we’ll have enough space for a couch, a coffee table and some plants, which will give us a second space to retreat to, if one of us wants to read while the other wants to sleep, or have a friend over.

I’ve been trawling Pinterest for inspiration, naturally.

We’ve been working with Cameron Barnes on the designs for the loft and he’s done a great job of visualising exactly what we want.

I can’t wait to show you guys all the amazing stuff I want to fill the space with. I’m super excited to be working with Coricraft, Dial-a-Bed and Volpes linen to create a magical space that I’ll be sharing with you as soon as the renovations are done.

PS. I’m always wondering how young people can actually afford to renovate, when I see their elaborate remodelled homes on social media. Keenan and I are SUPER fortunate to have my wonderfully supportive parents, who helped us to buy this house by investing 10% in the initial purchase. So when it came to the renovations, we asked if we could borrow the money from them and pay it off over 12 months, but also gave them the option to invest further in the property, which has almost-almost doubled in value since we bought it, which is what they decided to do. Just in case you were like “WHERE DO THEY GET THIS MONEY FROM?”, which is exactly what I would be thinking.