Maddie and I have been living with the build for over seven months now, and while the house is now more than habitable – and even approaching becoming a home again, the whole thing has been really exhausting. So last weekend, we took ourselves off for a weekend away at Lymington on the South Coast. We’ve been there before, staying in a pub called the Bosun’s Chair – largely because of the pies they serve for dinner!

So we did our bit to live up to the idea of the mad English and headed down to the beach. Not too sunny and very bracing, but incredibly refreshing, relaxing, peaceful, and absolutely lovely to spend some quality time together away from the pressure of the house.

So we had a night in the pub watching a not-at-all tense game of rugby against the French, eating pie and drinking beer. Then after a hearty and thoroughly deserved (no honest) breakfast, we headed off to the nearby Exbury Gardens. They are probably much more colourful later in the year when things start to bloom, but a day strolling  about beautiful woodland away from the crowds did the two of us the world of good.

And there were some splashes of colour around – lucky I discovered a close-up mode on the camera.

It’s been a long time since I posted here – as I said last time, essentially the build is finished and we are down to finishing touches – there are just a lot of them. We haven’t touched what used to be our garden – so there is a fair amount of landscaping to be done. But the biggest change left to happen is the wooden floor which will go throughout the open plan space downstairs. Once we have done that we can empty the storage units and make the house feel even more like our home. In the mean time we are spending a fair amount of free time decorating. The girls have been home over the past few weekends, so Charlotte and Chris mucked in as we decorated our old bedroom.

Then Becks and Phil have been home over Easter and have gone mad with the white paint. Between the four of us we have pretty much covered all of downstairs. Just the kitchen to paint downstairs – it needs too much careful taping and dust sheeting to protect all the work surfaces so that will be a job in itself. But the downstairs looks amazing. Much, much lighter.

And we’ve stolen an idea we saw on the TV during the week and painted the surround of the roof lantern a different shade – and what do you know, it looks fantastic.

And for those of you who have seen Maddie and I decorate previously, will not be surprised to hear that we have had a bit of a match pot frenzy – unlike us however, we made a decision in a single day and so won’t be living with patchwork walls for months on end as we have in the past.