When my parents renovated their bathroom a couple of years ago, they went back and forth on this exact decision for weeks. My dad wanted a big walk-in shower with a rain head, my mom didn’t want to give up her nightly bath. They ended up compromising in
For years, my bathroom cabinet was the kind of mess where you’d open the door and something would fall out. Extra toothbrushes, half-used bottles, and a hairdryer cord tangled around everything else, all crammed into one small cabinet under the sink. It wasn’t that I owned too much;
A few years ago I redid my guest bathroom in what I thought was a farmhouse style, shiplap on every wall, a barn door, mason jars everywhere, and it ended up feeling more like a theme park bathroom than a real one. It looked dated within a year,
The first time I renovated a bathroom, I got three quotes from contractors before I’d even picked a tile, and every single one came back higher than I expected. One quote alone was more than I’d budgeted for the entire project. I almost gave up and decided to
When I first walked into my current house, the bathroom was the one room that made me want to walk straight back out. It was barely big enough to turn around in, the door swung into the sink, and there was nowhere to put a single extra towel.
For years I believed I had a small kitchen with not enough storage. I’d cram cabinets until things fell out when I opened them, lose the good knife behind the cake tins, and reach past a wall of half-empty jars to find the one I wanted. Then I
The first time I tried to make my kitchen look farmhouse, I got it wrong in the most predictable way. I bought a stack of mass-produced signs with cursive words like gather and blessed, a wire basket shaped like a chicken, and enough distressed decor to fill a
When I chose my first proper countertop, I picked with my eyes and nothing else. I fell for a beautiful pale marble-look surface in a showroom, signed off on it, and spent the next two years learning what a porous, easily-marked worktop means when you cook the way
The kitchen in my first flat was dated in that specific, soul-sapping way: orange-toned wooden cabinets, dull brassy handles gone dark with age, a limescale-crusted tap, and a bare bulb overhead. I couldn’t afford to rip any of it out, and I didn’t own the place anyway. So
For the longest time my kitchen had exactly one light: a single bulb in the middle of the ceiling. I never questioned it. Then one winter evening I was chopping onions at the counter and realised I was working almost entirely in my own shadow, because I stood
Subscribe to my weekly newsletter. I don’t send any spam email ever!
