December 1999 always sticks in my mind.  We had moved into a fairly derelict house the end of August having put most of our furniture in storage where it remained for 4 months. By Christmas Eve, we had half a kitchen, a sink and a dishwasher as well as a floor in the living room – what bliss!  I was adamant that I was taking 4 days off to relax and I wasn’t going to feel guilty about it. I realised on St Stephen’s day that I was married to a total workaholic, we had returned from a walk in the lovely New Forest, lit the fire, had lunch and settled down to watch a film.  I was reading a book and keeping one eye on the television.  Brian was getting twitchier by the minute and in the end he stood up, announced he was bored and decided to go and assemble some more kitchen cupboards.  Whereas I felt I had worked hard enough for the year and was enjoying the relaxation.

The same happened this year – but luckily he now has the farm to disappear to cos I am still in relaxation mode.

When we lived in the UK (and bear it mind it was pre-children) decorating was our hobby. Our first house took 5 years, our second (which was the one I mentioned above) took 16 months and we found another house we fell in love with so only lived there for 20 months in total.  The next we lived in for 2 years before moving back to Ireland but within that time, we totally renovated that house, bought a house in Southampton to rent out and painted it throughout and made curtains for all the windows, and renovated another house in its entirely – totally gutted it but it was relatively easy as we could afford then to not have to live amongst all the dust and debris which made such a difference.  In case you think we were made of money, I’ll tell you how we afforded the deposit for the house in Southampton – I had finished my MA 2 years previously so told a white lie and got a £10,000 graduate loan.  I also marked exam papers that summer, it was an extremely hot summer and they couldn’t get anyone else to mark extra ones so I kept saying yes, and earned about £6,000 and between the two of them, that was our deposit.

I loved moving house frequently. A great way to prevent clutter building up!!  Plus we used to frequent the antique auctions and persuade ourselves that yes, another piece of lovely furniture would just about fit into our terraced house so we had to move to bigger houses just so we could buy more lovely furniture!!

We moved into our current house 4 years ago and while we have done quite a bit, there still remains a lot to be done.  We achieved very little on it in the last year (namely new fireplace in the living room and some changes to the kitchen) due to Brian being v busy on the farm, I being caught up with various things – business, kids, television programme, blogging ….!, and the recession and poor dairy prices meant we didn’t feel like spending too much extra money either. 

However, I have put together a list of New Year Decorating Resolutions – and hopefully we will achieve decorating a room a month  or every six weeks.

1.  Downstairs loo – new tiles on floor (which have been sitting in the utility since last April!), paint, wallpaper and a roman blind.

2. Cloakroom – paint/wallpaper and a roman blind

3. Landing upstairs – Paint walls, new carpet and paint architraves

(As I mentioned above, we tended to move house approximately every 2 years and I have to admit I have itchy feet. However, when you have 90 cows, you tend to have to live permanently near them so I don’t think I’ll be moving for some time yet.  Our house is a 1970s A roof, so there was quite a bit of wasted space under the elongated eaves, we knocked down a doorway and created a walk-in wardrobe for our bedroom, it has a slope but some of it is head-height so works fine.  However, our 7 year old now has his eye on this for his playroom so as we can’t move house we are all going to swop bedrooms with the exception of Kate.  My only regret is the carpet in his existing bedroom is gorgeous.)

4. The spare bedroom will become our bedroom - at the moment there is just an off-white on the walls and the floorboards are bare.  It’s not a huge room but will do fine.  So it needs paint/wallpaper, flooring, new curtains, lighting and some work to the wardrobe.

5.  Our bedroom will become Will’s. To be honest, it needs redecorating anyway – it is the feature wall painted one colour scenario which is so – 2 years ago!!  I’ve just been too lazy to empty the room and tackle it.  The floor needs to be repainted, transfer some rugs, carpet in the playroom part, paint/wallpaper, shelving and pictures.

6. Kate’s bedroom needs repainting and more shelves, will prob add wallpaper somewhere

7. Kitchen – we are thinking of adding a wood burning stove to the kitchen.  Although there is no chimney or flue on it, it is possible to place a flue out the wall and extend it on the exterior wall to above the roof line – that’s the expensive bit though, likely to cost about €1500 for the flue and installation alone.  I also have a huge dresser/cupboard that came out of the old castle 35 years ago and needs repair and repainting.

8. Utility – new sink, remove tiles from walls, replaster and paint, new cupboards/shelves..

9. New bathroom and all that entails ..

And that is it.  It will be interesting to see how much we achieve.

Do you have any new year resolutions for the decorating of your house – do share them or if you do a blog post on it, do post a link.

Happy New Year and all the best for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2010.