Five Ways To Make a New House Feel Like A Home

Five Ways To Make a New House Feel Like A Home

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have just moved into a new home. It’s quite an amazing house, stain glass windows everywhere, huge original fireplaces, grand staircase, high ceilings and my favourite part of it all, it has a turret! The house is amazing but it hasn’t been touched in years. We are talking no working kitchen, green carpets, wood chip walls… you name it, we have it! Needless to say, on the day we moved in, whilst the removals company were unloading my precious Chanel collection, the architect was drawing up plans to redesign our house. A week or two later the builders moved in. No new house will instantly feel like a home, but I was determined to feel clean, cosy and happy in our new house and make it feel like home, even during the chaotic first 48 hours.

♥

Luxe Slippers

A few weeks before I moved into my house, my friends at Emu sent me a pair of slippers. I remember putting them into my ‘moving pile’ and thinking, it was incredibly kind of them and I would use them when I moved into my new house. My oh my! I didn’t realise how much I would LOVE these slippers! They rarely leave my feet! No amount of hoovering will make the carpets feel like mine, so until we can rip up the carpets and sand down our floorboards, these slippers are my feet’s best friends! I wear them the second I get out of bed, until I leave the house / go to bed. Emu make all their slippers from sheepskin so even if my feet are still a little damp when I get out the shower, it doesn’t really matter! In short, these slippers are warm, cosy and keep my feet well away from old carpets and builders’ rubble!

New Bedding

We were lucky enough to book the removal service where the men build your bed back up on arrive. Nice, right?! The only thing is, our bedding had been in storage for the last 8 weeks and even though it was packed away clean and aired, when we got it out, it just didn’t feel as fresh as we wanted. We slept with kit for one night before promptly ordering some new bedding from Soak & Sleep. New sheets are the best and it always feels like a bit of a luxury, but when you are moving into a new house, you feel it all the more. It gives you that sanctuary even when everything around you is chaos! Next time I move, I will plan ahead and have new bedding for the first night. But believe me, it makes all the difference! If you have moved from a furnished flat to an unfurnished house, it’s possible you will need a new bed and mattress, please remember it can take weeks for companies to deliver beds, but Mattress Next Day deliver great beds and mattress’ super fast (can you guess from the name!?) so don’t be caught out if you suddenly realise the bed you have been sleeping on isn’t actually your own! It also comes in super handy if you have family staying over to help decorate.

New Towels

It’s a similar tale of #FirstWorldProblems, but our towels had been in storage and they didn’t feel as clean and new as I wanted. So again, Soak & Sleep to the Rescue with huge, clean, white bath sheets. No matter how many times you scrub the shower, it won’t feel like yours, but these towels are so big, fluffy and clean, it won’t really matter!!

New Shower Gel

It’s not that our bathroom is dirty, it’s just it’s not ours. We scrubbed it clean, changed the shower curtain (ew!) and changed the toilet seat (even more ew!), but it still felt a little like we were using someone else’s bathroom. New white fluffy towels made our bathroom feel more homely and so did our super-luxe Molton Brown shower gel. Molton Brown always smells so good; fresh, natural and luxurious, exactly what we need each morning!

 Scented Candle

On the night of our first day in the house, we got a takeaway which we ate with plastic forks in the middle of a empty room. We climbed into bed and started to watch Orange Is The New Black on our laptop (streaming it on 4G of course!) and I suddenly remembered a scented candle Crabtree & Evelyn had given me on a recent press trip to Paris. I lit it and we watched TV in bed with the scent of pine filling the room. There was boxes everywhere and it had been a chaotic day, but it was really lovely and the scented candle was such a nice way to make the house feel really cosy. The candle had about 40 or 50 hours burning time, so I burnt it for the next week or so. The candle was quite strongly scented and even though our rooms are big, the fragrance really filled the warm and made December in our new house feel cosy and christmassy, despite all the boxes, building work and chaos! Similarly, a few days after we moved in, Debenhams Flowers surprised me with a wonderful bunch of fresh roses (roses are my favourite!). I popped them in a jug and they really cheered the place up. There’s something about fresh flowers which just brighten a room!

…And there we have it, my five ways to make a new house feel like a home!