Welcome to Our Home!

The fact that my partner and I bought our first home together earlier this year shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given that it's pretty much all I've been talking about all year! However, now we've been living here for six months, got settled in and got (mostly) all the initial decorating and maintenance tasks sorted, it's about time I invited you in for a look around!

I'm planning to do a short series of posts all about our journey to make this house our home, broken up room by room to make it a little easier to manage. So, for the first post, let's start at the very beginning - our hallway, the entrance to our home!

When we bought the house, the hallway was covered in muddy footprints and littered with almost a year's worth of junk mail and letters for previous owners and tenants. In short, it was chaotic, to say the least. I spent over an hour sorting the mountain of mail into stuff to be recycled and letters to be returned to the sender, and we borrowed a second-hand vacuum cleaner and some stain remover to get to work on the carpet. 

Afterwards, the hallway looked brand new!

We decided early on that we were going to do the minimum when it came to decorating our new home (largely due to budget constraints - new furniture and appliances are expensive, you know!) and just focus on the rooms we used the most and the things which couldn't wait. As a result, our hallway kept the same clean white-painted walls and bog-standard neutral carpet that was installed when it was first built. The coat hooks, shelf and mirror were also already there when we moved in, so we decided to keep them all where they were and just focus on some smaller details to make the space our own.

My personal favourite addition was the doormat, which I had loved so much that I actually bought it before we even completed on the house! We're both big Harry Potter lovers, so this was really the perfect way to set the tone for our whole home.

I also have quite a considerable shoe collection, so we picked up two cheap but functional wooden shoe racks to display my collection in style. As you can see from the picture, I have far more space for my shoes than he does! It's also much easier to just grab a pair of shoes that are perfect for the day ahead rather than having to ferret about in a cupboard to find the missing shoe of the pair you want to wear.

My final finishing touch to the hallway was the mail baskets. I found the idea online when looking for inspiration and fell absolutely in love with it, scouring the Internet in search of the perfect baskets to suit the space. These black wire baskets came as a pair - they fit perfectly next to the mirror and are ideal for keeping incoming and outgoing mail safe. I also recently picked up a few cute little chalkboard tags which I've since tied onto the separate compartments of the baskets and labelled for each of us. The gorgeous wooden plaque above the baskets was a gift from one of my best friends and I feel it adds the perfect finishing touch to the hallway.

Our next biggest task in the hallway is to sand and repaint the stairs - then the hallway really will be complete!

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!