Who’d have thought stairs could be so problematic? To be honest, I’ve never really given stairs a lot of thought, because they’re just…there. But our stairs need a lot of thinking about, because they’re pretty unusual. We have one set going upstairs from the living room, and another going down into what will become The […]
If you’re remotely interested in the tales of our house renovation, or maybe fancy a bit of a break out in Istria, we’d love you to give us a follow over on Twitter. If you’re not that interested in the story of the house etc, but like to travel – and stay – in nice […]
Although our house is quite old – we think parts of it are over 200 years old – and is quite traditional in structural style to many of the stone houses in Istria, we are determined to stamp a contemporary feel on it. Apart from The Well Room where the floor is stone flags (therefore […]
Quick backstory if you don’t know our story. June 2016 – visited Croatia on holiday (Zadar). Loved it. July 2016 – saw a house online for sale in Istria, northern Croatia. Flew out on impulse, loved it. August 2016 – put our West Didsbury house 0n the market and made an offer on the Istria […]
In the house we’ve bought in Istria, we have two bathrooms. Sounds like a bit of a luxury, doesn’t it? But, both are very small and both are poorly laid out. The house had previously only been used in the summer, and more recently, less frequently, so not a great deal of attention had been […]
During December we left the house in the hands of Misko and Sergio, the plan being for them to get as much of the dirty work done in the kitchen as possibe while we were away. Although they kept in contact regularly and sent photos of progress, we quickly realised that they weren’t going to […]
A few days on from the last reno update and a lot has happened, kitchen-wise. The stones from the kitchen window hole have been saved and the red bricks which were below the chimney have been taken out. These will be replaced by the stones which have been removed, meaning that the front of the […]
Today, the scaffolding arrived. It was brought to us by Edo, a lovely Dutch guy who has really helped us ease into Istrian life, as he did the same thing 12 years ago. He brought the scaffolding to us because he was already going to Sergio’s, as he was taking hay for Sergio’s horse. Which […]
After yesterday’s excitement of taking down the false ceiling – plus removing a dead mouse, numerous critters and a hornets’ nest – today was always going to be a bit of anti-climax in terms of progress. However, in the short time that Misko and Sergio were here, they achieved an awful lot. In order to […]
It seems like no time – although it’s actually nearly four years ago! – that our West Didsbury home was being smashed to bits as we renovated. And, now we’re doing it all again – but this time in Istria, in northern Croatia. When we first arrived we knew no-one apart from the local go-to […]
When we’re not working and running our business, we seem to spend a lot of time doing the jobs around the house that we can do ourselves. It would be lovely to have a limitless budget and get people in to do everything, but we don’t have such a budget and even if we did, […]
We’ve done IKEA kitchens and while they’ve largely been great and just what we wanted/needed in the past, schlepping to Zagreb or beyond Trieste (the two nearest stores to us), just seemed a bit far, this time. It’s OK to do these trips to buy beddings and candles but we needed somewhere a bit closer. […]