A change is as good as a rest

Or is it?

I very much want to do a blog post about my move, a huge thing in my life, we got the keys to our new home at the end of June. I feel I need to share this experience as it is so relevant to my subject matter. I have learnt so much - a lot that I did not really want to learn, if I am honest, but it has deepened my understanding as an interiors journalist hugely.

We wanted a change and we will be swapping our large seaside home, with an extensive garden, for a modern, riverside cottage, with a much smaller garden. The cottage is uphill from the river, in case anyone is worried about flood plains - we certainly were, and is set beside a stunning ribbon of woodland...

This photograph was taken for the estate agents brochure in winter, when we went to view the house.

We were then completely amazed when we arrived to move in at the end of June to find the small, bare garden we were expecting to be quite generous and amazingly abundant!

A good result we hope and very much what we wanted, except, initially, we did not actually know what we wanted, we just wanted a change and were looking quite randomly at all sorts of possibilities and became quite dizzy with uncertainty until we came upon this cottage and it just felt right. Our big dilemma was coast or country: city life is not for me at the moment. You can get a lot more for your money in the country than you can on the coast, seaside towns are popular and more expensive, and feel crowded and busy in the summer. I was seriously contemplating a country home, an Aga and a conservatory were high on my Wishlist.

However, if you have lived beside the sea, as I did for 16 years, it is very hard to leave and a big house with an Aga and a conservatory is not really compatible with our low maintenance lifestyle wishes, which we hope will enable us to travel and focus on our photographic and artwork, which are very much entwined.

Our riverside cottage is 5 miles from a stunning beach, so I am hoping to enjoy the best of both worlds. According to Google maps, we are a 42 minute cycle to the beach. I am gearing up to manage this on a nice sunny day. I am quite nervous about it though, so wish me luck - I will let you know how I get on!

We have not fully moved in yet: all our furniture is in storage, so we are taking advantage of having an empty house to clean and decorate.

We had hoped to lay wooden floors as well, in advance of our furniture arriving - who were we kidding??

We have managed to acquire a small collection of wooden flooring samples, but we have NOT managed to decide on one that we like, let alone order any and actually lay it!!

I have to say our expectations as to what we could do in the house while our furniture was in storage for a week were wildly unrealistic!

I am amazed at how nerve wracking we both found the whole moving thing, by the way. It brought up so many questions about the meaning and purpose of 'home', what we want from life, why we wanted a change. I found myself contemplating the beauty of living in one family home for the rest of your days and seeing this as an ideal, but also knowing that this was not what I wanted.

I am, of course, torn about leaving the gorgeous stretch of coastline that has been home to our family for so long, but also, honestly, so excited about exploring a new part of the world and our blank canvas interior.

Watch this space for regular updates.

You can also find me on Instagram and I run a Facebook group called Home Style Hub where I share all sorts of tips and ideas about how to create a beautiful interior.

I will try and practice what I preach - desperate to break all my own rules though - I just want to decorate and put lots of artwork and gorgeous curtains up, I do NOT want to sort out the radiators and all the boring plumbing stuff first, sorry!