Home decorator Lara Winter is one of Ideal Home's Open House contributors, sharing her thoughts on revamping a 200 year old cottage to make it right for modern family life. See the rest of her articles here.
When we moved into our cottage ten years ago, we had exactly the kind of problem we'd spent years hoping for.
We'd bought our dream home.
The only issue was that we'd spent almost all our money buying it.
At the time, my husband and I were moving out of a shared house and into a cottage that felt impossibly grown-up. I was heavily pregnant with our son, and between solicitors, surveys and preparing for a new arrival, furniture wasn't exactly top of the priority list.
What made it worse was that we'd viewed the cottage fully furnished.
The previous owners had beautiful furniture. Large furniture. Proper grown-up furniture. The sort of furniture that made every room feel finished and perfectly at home in the cottage.
Then they moved out.
And we moved in with our IKEA table.
To be fair, it had served us perfectly well in our previous home. But in the cottage it suddenly looked tiny. The rooms felt bigger. The ceilings felt higher. The house we'd fallen in love with somehow felt slightly emptier than we'd imagined.
I still remember one of our neighbours, a lovely older lady, coming round shortly after we moved in. She took one look at our dining table sitting in the middle of the room and laughed.
"Oh dear," she said. "You'll need a bigger table."
She was absolutely right.
I remember feeling slightly disappointed by the mismatch. Not because I expected everything to look perfect, but because I'd spent so long dreaming about the cottage that I'd never really thought about what it would look like on moving day. In my imagination, the dream house and the dream interiors had arrived together.
In reality, we got the house first.
Then our son arrived.
As it turns out, newborn babies are remarkably uninterested in interior design. They don't care whether your dining chairs match, whether your furniture suits the room or whether the house feels finished. They mostly care about sleeping, eating and ensuring that nobody else gets much sleep either.
For a while, everything stayed exactly as it was.
Looking back, I think that's the stage nobody talks about enough. We often see the before and after. The empty room and the beautiful reveal. The dramatic transformation and the finished space. What we rarely see is the awkward middle bit.
The room with the temporary table that somehow stays for years. The inherited cabinet you're not quite sure about. The lamp that's only there because you already owned it. The years when a house is still becoming itself.
Eventually, little by little, things began to change.
I started thrifting. We replaced the tiny dining table with one that actually suited the room. I painted old cabinets and transformed second-hand finds into pieces that felt more personal. Some projects worked brilliantly. Others looked considerably better in my imagination.
But over time, the cottage slowly started catching up with the vision I'd had when we first moved in.
Not because we suddenly spent a fortune furnishing it, but because we added things gradually. One piece at a time. One project at a time. One lucky second-hand find at a time.
Looking back now, I'm actually glad it happened that way.
Every room tells the story of those years. The painted furniture. The thrifted pieces. The marketplace finds that somehow turned out to be exactly what we needed. None of it arrived overnight, and perhaps that's exactly what makes it feel like ours.
These days, social media can make it seem as though homes appear fully formed the moment the keys are handed over. But in reality, most homes evolve slowly. Life gets in the way. Budgets are limited. Priorities shift.
Sometimes the dream house comes first and the furniture follows years later.
And thankfully, we did eventually buy a bigger table.
