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A House Full of Sunshine

The art of making home

Our new house – welcome inside!

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It’s time for some inside shots of our brand new house! These photos were taken near completion (but not quite there.) So you’re getting the bare bones of the house here. Don’t mind the unpainted skirting here and there, bathrooms that are missing bits, and builder’s stuff on the counters.

There is something so exciting to me about looking at empty rooms and dreaming about how I’m going to fill them.

The floors are Blackbutt, polished with a satin finish (because I dislike gloss. And it’s hard to keep it looking clean.) SO glad I went with the timber floors! I just love them!

The woven pendant light is from Freedom Furniture. Not that we have a Freedom in town, or anything. That would make life too easy. No, this light was purchased on holiday, stuffed with cushions, and crammed at the children’s feet so that my passenger-side seat at the front had to be pushed right forward for it to fit in. We drove seven hours in the car with my knees pressed up against the dash in order to get that pendant light home.

These are the sacrifices people make when they are truly nuts about interior design. (Or maybe just truly nuts.)

The wall colour was a risk. I really wanted to go for a dark moody grey for all the living room walls. It’s much darker than I would normally use in a living area, but I really wanted something dramatic and a bit daring that I could offset with lighter decor accents. I figured that with the high ceilings and the big open space, we could pull off a dark colour without making the room look too closed in. I was super glad I took the plunge – so happy with how it turned out!

The colour is Dulux “Timeless Grey”, which thankfully remains a TRUE grey on the walls instead of turning blue or purple or brown, as SO many greys do! (They don’t call grey a “colour chameleon” for nothing!) I have been burned before with greys, so I started by looking up the RGB (Red/ Green/ Blue) values of the colour on the Dulux website (find the chart here) to check that the values were reasonably equal. If one is much higher than the others (eg the “B”), you can be sure the colour will look bluish on the walls, even if you could swear on your great-grandmother’s grave that the paint swatch is a neutral grey in your hand. (Tricksy!!)

I then made sure to get a sample pot of the colour and paint up a big piece of cardboard, then look at it in the room itself at a couple of different times of day to see how the lighting affected the hue.


This is the view looking back from the living area into the kitchen and playroom. (Yes, the playroom has a yellow wall. Don’t freak out. That’s a halfway-in-progress shot right before I completed a major project on that wall. It looks AMAZING now – trust me! Oh, I am just itching to share!! Patience, patience.)

Note my spy-holes through the wall above the sink. Custom-made for preventing mischief. I can now wash dishes and break up fights simultaneously. Two of my favourite activities rolled into one. 😉

Let’s zoom in on the kitchen for a few moments. The layout is very similar to the kitchen in our last house, just slightly bigger.

I wanted to go for a bit more of a classic modern feel in this house, with some vintage elements. Hence the industrial-style pendant lights (also from Freedom Furniture – luckily, these ones fitted into the boot of the car!):

The VJ panelling to the back and sides of the island bench:

And the pièce de résistance: my splashbacks.

Because of the dark grey walls, I knew I wanted a white-on-white-on-white kitchen in this house: white cupboards, white benches, white splashbacks. To make this work, the splashbacks needed to have a really interesting texture. I wanted something vintage-looking, and I went round to every tile shop in town asking if they had white tiles with an embossed pattern. I scoured online shops also, to no avail. 
When no-one had the first clue what I meant by an “embossed pattern” (except to produce tiles with modern raised ripples and suchlike, which was totally NOT what I was after), I found myself repeatedly explaining that I wanted something “like the pressed tin ceilings in old Queenslanders.” Blank looks. Raised eyebrows. Shaking heads. “But you could try something like this….” (More ultra-modern/ geometric/ all-wrong tiles.) 
After repeating this routine a few times, the penny finally dropped. I wanted the look of pressed tin – why didn’t I use actual pressed tin? (Duh!) But would that even be possible for this sort of application? I Googled it, and what did I discover? There is actually a pressed tin product that can be used in kitchen splashbacks. It’s powder-coated to be heat-resistant. 
Please pause for a moment to feel my excitement here. Oh, man. I was ecstatic!
What’s more – it turns out, it’s actually a thing! They even used it on The Block one year (the season I completely missed). I had no idea! But it was oddly reassuring to realise that I was not completely cuckoo, as some local tile shop owners no doubt suspected, and in fact I’d come up with something all on my own that turned out to be a bit of a cutting-edge trend. Yeah! (*fist pump*). I’ve always wanted to be cool like that. 
As a nice bonus – the splashbacks are seamless, so they’re super easy to wipe clean! No more spattered bolognaise sauce on my white grout lines!
Here’s a view from the kitchen looking out across the living area, so you can see the connection between the spaces.
 
To the left of the kitchen is another design aspect I was deadset on including in our floor-plan: a study nook. (Currently minus the desk – that’s coming!)
I hate all the clutter that has always ended up on our kitchen bench – paperwork, bills, keys, mobile phones on chargers, shopping lists, diary, and the list goes on. I like my island bench to be clear except for a knife block and a fruit bowl. But I knew from experience that the only way I could hope to deflect the kitchen clutter would be to incorporate a command centre RIGHT NEAR the kitchen. A study in a separate room would not cut it. Stuff would still get dumped on the bench out of laziness and habit, and because the kitchen is the most central location in the home. 

The added bonus of this command centre/ study nook is that it will enable me to work on my computer without withdrawing from the rest of the family. It’s much easier to snatch ten minutes here and there to catch up on emails and blogging when you can still keep one eye/ ear on the kids playing.

Here’s a little sneak peek at the rest of the house.

This is the main (kids’) bathroom. I was so happy with how that white VJ panelling turned out! Just exactly the classic, beachy feel I was after.

The paint colour is Dulux “High Point”, half-strength. “High Point” is the lightest shade on its paint swatch, but green has to be handled carefully – it can feel overwhelming in a small space. So I opted to lighten it further to half-strength (all you have to do is ask your painter) and I’m glad I did. It’s just the right shade of pale sea-green I was looking for, offset against lots of crisp white.

The laundry carries through the same colour and design elements to connect the adjacent wet areas:

And the view from our Master Bedroom into the ensuite. We painted the entire bedroom and ensuite in Dulux “Milton Moon”, which is a lovely warm, pale grey. This creates a bit of connection with the living area colour scheme so the house feels cohesive.

Finally, here’s the front of the house with render and paint complete. (Timber feature above the portico still to come.) 
The main wall colour inside and out is Dulux “Lexicon Half”, which is a nice crisp white. The weatherboard feature is “Timeless Grey” (the living room colour) at about half strength. This measurement was not exact, as they used the leftover grey and mixed it in with some leftover white to get an in-between shade. It’s lighter than Timeless Grey but heaps darker than Milton Moon. (Incidentally, we tried a test-patch of that bedroom colour on the exterior wall, and it looked almost white. Strong sunlight really washes out exterior colours.)

So that’s it – the bare bones of a brand-new house.

Now that the boxes are unpacked, we’re gradually settling in to the new abode. I have a few exciting projects already completed, and plenty more in the pipeline that I can’t wait to share!

I love this process of taking a builder-standard house and turning it into a home. If you’d like to stay tuned for the journey, you might wish to subscribe by email in my sidebar. It’s fast and free, and the easiest way to ensure you don’t miss a post.

Thanks so much for stopping by!

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Comments

  1. azure1 says

    Love it all, very inspiring! Just had to say i know exactly what you mean about the tile story, and the lugging home stuff from Freedom lol. When we built, where we lived we didn&#39t have many furniture or homewares shops to choose from, so yes some items were stashed in luggage on holidays :). I would&#39ve loved VJ panelling, timber floors etc. but i received the strange looks even asking for &#39subway&#39 tile for our kitchen splash back, lol. Still, if there&#39s a next time…. šŸ˜‰

    • karen says

      Oh yes – I totally know what you mean! The builders where we live aren&#39t known for their willingness to try new things. In the first house we built I requested bi-fold doors to lead out onto the back patio, and the builder had never heard of them before. Any variation to standard that we suggested was met with "it can&#39t be done". Luckily this time we ended up with an innovative builder who was willing to try some new ideas. The subway tile story – that is hilarious! These people need to get on Pinterest quick-smart. šŸ˜‰ I&#39m convinced it&#39s the best way for global trends to spread instantly without that 2-5 year lag we&#39ve always experienced in regional areas.

  2. azure1 says

    Love it all, very inspiring! Just had to say i know exactly what you mean about the tile story, and the lugging home stuff from Freedom lol. When we built, where we lived we didn't have many furniture or homewares shops to choose from, so yes some items were stashed in luggage on holidays :). I would've loved VJ panelling, timber floors etc. but i received the strange looks even asking for 'subway' tile for our kitchen splash back, lol. Still, if there's a next time…. šŸ˜‰

    • karen says

      Oh yes – I totally know what you mean! The builders where we live aren't known for their willingness to try new things. In the first house we built I requested bi-fold doors to lead out onto the back patio, and the builder had never heard of them before. Any variation to standard that we suggested was met with "it can't be done". Luckily this time we ended up with an innovative builder who was willing to try some new ideas. The subway tile story – that is hilarious! These people need to get on Pinterest quick-smart. šŸ˜‰ I'm convinced it's the best way for global trends to spread instantly without that 2-5 year lag we've always experienced in regional areas.

  3. Fiona @ Jackadaw says

    Your home is lovely. We painted our master bedroom Timeless Grey and I LOVE it. For the same reason as you – I tried about 5 different samples that were all too blue or purple before I finally got the Timeless Grey sample. I had seen it in a magazine but it looked much darker, should have just tried it in the first place. The rest of the house is a pale grey Dulux Vanilla Quake half strength with a pop of sea glass green in the laundry although I can&#39t recall the name of the colour off the top of my head. The Vanilla Quake changes with the available light and can be anything from almost white to a moody soft grey. Clearly we are both women with great taste. We&#39re in the middle of redoing our kitchen with bench tops due to arrive on Friday (fingers crossed) and next on my list is the living room. That will feel like phase 1 of updating our house is complete to me. Can&#39t wait to see more of your home.

    • karen says

      Helloooo fellow Dulux lover! šŸ™‚ Vanilla Quake sounds quite gorgeous! And I love the sound of sea glass green. Mmmm. I think my dream job would be thinking up names for paint colours. šŸ™‚ So glad to have you here – good luck with that kitchen!

  4. wendy evans says

    Karen, so great to be able to see what your new house is like and be taken on your journey. Can&#39t wait to come back to Rocky and see it for myself. love, Wendy

    • karen says

      We would all love that! šŸ™‚ And meanwhile it&#39s so much fun being able to share the journey with family and friends who don&#39t live close by.

  5. Fiona @ Jackadaw says

    Your home is lovely. We painted our master bedroom Timeless Grey and I LOVE it. For the same reason as you – I tried about 5 different samples that were all too blue or purple before I finally got the Timeless Grey sample. I had seen it in a magazine but it looked much darker, should have just tried it in the first place. The rest of the house is a pale grey Dulux Vanilla Quake half strength with a pop of sea glass green in the laundry although I can't recall the name of the colour off the top of my head. The Vanilla Quake changes with the available light and can be anything from almost white to a moody soft grey. Clearly we are both women with great taste. We're in the middle of redoing our kitchen with bench tops due to arrive on Friday (fingers crossed) and next on my list is the living room. That will feel like phase 1 of updating our house is complete to me. Can't wait to see more of your home.

    • karen says

      Helloooo fellow Dulux lover! šŸ™‚ Vanilla Quake sounds quite gorgeous! And I love the sound of sea glass green. Mmmm. I think my dream job would be thinking up names for paint colours. šŸ™‚ So glad to have you here – good luck with that kitchen!

  6. wendy evans says

    Karen, so great to be able to see what your new house is like and be taken on your journey. Can't wait to come back to Rocky and see it for myself. love, Wendy

    • karen says

      We would all love that! šŸ™‚ And meanwhile it's so much fun being able to share the journey with family and friends who don't live close by.

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