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. […]
The summer has been a time for travel, seeing family and friends and lots of white-washing of walls. The house feels much more light and airy, now that the bare stone walls are much softer. And now, as autumn starts to take a hold, our thoughts are turning to the bigger renovation projects. The ripping […]
A busy summer of visiting family and friends has meant a busy time in between visits, doing what we can do ourselves to make our house as comfortable as possible for guests. Some things we just can’t tackle ourselves – new kitchen, new bathrooms, new stairs, new boundary wall – and frustratingly, we are reliant […]
It’s nearly four months since we arrived, shortly followed by every single thing we owned in the world, in our new home, in northern Istria. It’s been a whirlwind four months, filled with new places, new friends, bureaucracy, incredible weather, amazing food, new languages – and getting to grips with a stone farmhouse, parts of […]
We’ve never had huge outdoor spaces anywhere that we’ve lived previously. In our last house in West Didsbury, we managed to create quite a funky little haven, out of scaffold planks. But it was still a bit of a tight squeeze and although we loved it, we never had a feeling of space. Well, we’re […]
The House, until we bought it, had been empty for quite a long time. It had been used as a family holiday home, but was in need of an immediate injection of warmth and a bit of TLC. Although we do have renovation plans, these are a bit further down the line as we work […]
After two days of drowning in boxes and bubblewrap, we finally carved out a tiny corner of normality in the living room – unpacking and putting together our sofa was a joy, as was having some cosy candlelight. This may look very lovely (above), but careful photographing did hide the scenes of utter chaos out […]
So, three months after we signed all of the legal documents for The House in the solictors’ office in Rijeka, we found ourselves, on 1st March 2017, heading from our stop-over in Zagreb, to the village of Zrenj in Istria. A very good friend of ours had helped us to organise the transportation of all […]