Seeing out the old year

I thought, since here at the wee crofthoose, a fairy big project is underway to revamp each of the 8 rooms & 2 bathrooms on a very very limited budget, that blogging might be a good way to keep a diary, esp as everything will be done on a shoestring budget. We've done the big job.. The new kitchen is in, finishing is underway & there's a little left from the kitchen budget to enable a small fabric spend to magic up some co-ordinating kitchen linens & various other handy bits and pieces. The dinning room is underway & will be blogged shortly.

Our budget for each room other than the kitchen & bathrooms is fairy straight forward... 2 to 4 pots of paint & a max of  £100 on fabrics, this means setting very strict limits... get the most out of what you spend it on. Fabric choices for curtains & blinds must also lend itself to accessories and co-ordinates so that no fabric is wasted & to make things go that little bit futher that little bit easier, small things will be done to tie the 3 main rooms, kitchen/dining/lounge, together ie the excess from the  fabric used to make the roman blind for the kitchen was recently used up making scatter cushions for the lounge, fabric from the dining room roman blind was also used to recover the dining chairs & the motifs from the remainder can be used as raw edge applique on Zakka style dining linen projects once we pass the season of christmas gift sewing.

The lounge is next, we'd love new sofas but like a new carpet.. they are totally off budget at the moment, so we may well be resorting to stripping and varnishing the oak floorboards as revamping the lounge will also involve putting up new stud walls as we chop the top off the room to make an office, which will make the rather long lounge easier and more ecconomical to heat, so instead of new sofas, a dive into the fabric stash & throw quilts will have to do the job instead. We are a bit ahead of our budget with the lounge as we already have curtain fabric to hand which was a bit of an extravagant purchase for our old house (but half price in the sale else we'd never have bought it !) and not used before we sold up and moved, so lounge curtains are already provided for leaving me the full fabric budget for this room, some of which will be used to buy some cotton/linen blend fabric for zakka style roman blinds & runners for the sideboard, the rest may be donated to the dining room to enable the purchase of more scrummy fabrics for table linens.

We also cook a lot here, everything from scratch & using meats and vegetables we produce/grow ourselves. Bread is also a big thing with us having no supermarket within usable distance so recipes and meal ideas will also be a feature.