'Our home is now EVEN BETTER'

With plenty of boxes already ticked, Carrie boosted her new house with extra space, bold design touches and eclectic styling

We bought this house without actually seeing it ourselves,' says Carrie. 'Ed and I were on the way to the airport for a short holiday, when he spotted it online. When he showed me, I just thought, "Wow, I want to live there!" 

'We'd been house-hunting for a while, as we were expecting our first child and were on the lookout for somewhere family-friendly, with an open-plan layout and a garden. We called my parents, who went to view it and guessed that we'd fall in love with it. On the strength of photos and floor plans, we made an offer.

Relaxing start

Luckily for us our gamble paid off. The previous owner had remodelled and extended downstairs to make a big, all-in-one kitchen-dining-living zone with glass doors opening to a lovely, private garden. There was a separate living room for more formal occasions, a big hall and five bedrooms. The colour schemes, all cool greys and neutrals, were very much what I'd have chosen, too. The bathroom was classic and there were lovely lights, along with shutters on the windows. The dark kitchen cabinets and white worktops were similar to what we'd had before.

There was a great mix of old and modern, which is definitely my taste, so most of our existing furniture fitted in well. We could just move in and, rather than make big changes, we just needed to refresh what was here. With a baby on the way, it was perfect.

First projects

Once our daughter was here and we'd got settled in, I began to look around the house a bit more closely and I made a few smallish changes, really just building on what was here. We inherited a rather tired-looking dark-blue Aga with the kitchen, so I had it reenamelled in pale grey, which was quite an outlay, but it really spruced it up.