How Has It Been 3 Years?!

I’m ashamed to admit that it’s been nearly three years since my last blog post – but we all know how life goes: you sometimes end up prioritising things that need to be done over things you’d like to do! That being said, one of my goals this year is to come back to the blog and write some more content – I have sooooo much to share with you about new things we’ve learned and where we’ve managed to make progress! I cannot wait to get it all off my chest (and out of my camera roll!).

Perhaps the most exciting thing from the last three years, at least in our view, is that Chris and I finally managed to actually get married in July 2022! Despite two postponements courtesy of COVID, we are officially married – and it is just the best. First of all, because of all the wonderful blessings that marriage brings – but as a close second, because we are finally done with the endless wedding preparation!

Now, a regular wedding is hard enough to plan – but (and this feeds into a big part of why we went quiet for the last few years!) planning to get married at your home is a different beast entirely.

We spent the 18 months in the run up to the wedding working flat out to get the house and gardens to a state that could host our families for the week before the wedding and cater for a 140 person outdoor event over three days. It was, I think it’s fair to say, bananas – but we genuinely loved working together (and with our dearly loved garden helper, Will) and seeing everything come together.

I’ll never forget saying to our wedding planner Rebecca that I felt guilty because I wasn’t doing more of the typical bride DIY things – making invites, making favors, crafting centre pieces, etc., and that I had paid professionals to do these things for me. Without missing a beat, she told me that I was being silly, because I was DIYing the whole venue – and while that might be a bit of an overstatement, she wasn’t entirely wrong. Looking back, we had to do lists with literally hundreds of items – and some of the things were …non-traditional wedding prep tasks, to say the least (for example: cleaning up a decades old burn pile full of nails, barbed wire, and broken glass and then re-grading the space with a mini digger to create a parking space for our vendors 😁).

But, we made it through, and we still liked each other on our wedding day – here’s a photo for proof (credit: Andrew Rae):

Doesn’t the house look fabulous?

After the wedding, we both decided we needed a BREAK. A real break. No significant projects for the house or for the garden for the rest of 2022, minimum.

In the end, because of some big changes at work for both of us (we both accepted new roles with our companies in 2023), the break ended up extending through 2023. But, we missed being busy with the house and seeing her make progress, so we are ready to dive back in this year and have a number of things we want to tackle (time and finances allowing!).

So, this year you can look forward to updates on the renovation and garden work from 2021-2023 as well as a few new projects to be done in 2024 – yay!

Just a cheeky little taster of the things I want to write about this year (in no particular order and also definitely not for my own reference later…definitely not.):

1. An update on the house history (as it turns out, what we thought we knew about the house history is not entirely correct – and I have a looooot to share on that with you all!)
2. Our wedding weekend – including lots of pictures of the grounds and house!
3. Renovations to the master bedroom and two further bedrooms
4. A complete renovation of our drawing room (I think this one will blow your socks off!)
5. The renovation of the vestibule, lobby, and hall – including the cupola
6. The complete transformation of the master en-suite bathrooms (including changing two divided rooms back into the original single room!)
7. The walled garden progress
8. The gut and renovation of the Garden Cottage
9. The demolition of the super asbestos-y log stores
10. Some cool antique finds
11. Projects this year to come [creating a nice outdoor space for barbecues, a face lift for the family bathroom in the wing, reworking the kitchen garden, building a new log store, fixing some large-ish damage from a roof leak in the wing master en-suite, hanging some art, installing a new log burner in the main master bedroom, and refreshing the main master bedroom after having various trades in]
12. Our latest rescue cat Frazzle (aka Sassafrazzle Jazzy Pants)

We’ve managed to work through so much since 2020, but there’s still an enormous amount to come, and I really can’t wait to share it with you. Hopefully, I’ve piqued your interest enough with the little preview above – so come back in a few weeks for my next post!