Before & After | Our Home

Hi lovelies!

I want to share with you some before and afters of our home and the story behind how we got where we are with it today. It has not been easy…It’s required patience, understanding and compromise. To narrow it all down it required a lot of self-control because I wanted to kill everyone ☹.

Before I begin here is a disclaimer: My home is still not complete!

So… We got married May 2016 and managed to move into our home all way in September 2016. We had a hard time finding a home as Amsterdam isn’t very budget friendly when it comes to property; in case you’re wondering why, it’s earning related and I will share this information in more detail in the future if you would like me to.

Skipping all the boring details as to how and what it took to get the house when we finally found one, it was one that needed a LOT of work and is only 75m2!

Here’s the personal part to it all… I just thought it would be nice for me to share with you the reality of a young couple starting a life together from scratch.

We had no savings to start with, we had spent all of what we had on the wedding and the honeymoon. This meant that we were going to go with the flow and let things just fall into place. This is something I would not advise to anyone, I repeat…I don’t advise you to buy a home if you don’t have any savings!

The day that we got our keys we went into the house and decided to analyse the areas that needed work done only to find ourself wanting to redo EVERYTHING! The walls and floors were in serious need of a makeover, the bathroom and toilet all needed to be stripped out and replaced (low budget ofcourse) and the rest I had to deal with how it was for now.

The kitchen cupboards stayed, but we changed the backsplash, the tap, the sink, the stove and of course the kitchen counter. Everything was from IKEA and cost us under €1000. The glass backsplash was a gift from our family and the fridge was probably more expensive than the whole kitchen, but it’s something we were willing to spend the money on.

The fireplace was something I really wanted because the wall from the living room to the kitchen is 11 meters long and I wanted something creative and special that could separate them both. Many of you ask me about this design, I drew the whole thing myself with pencil and paper before it was put to work! I made sure that the top part of our fireplace had storage on the sides because when you have limited space, you want as much storage as possible! I added a lower console for the TV which in my opinion looks much more satisfying! I love it! Everything is hidden away nicely (like all the mess 😊).

Can you imagine this is the same room? Bigger furniture can make your room appear so much bigger. This is the existing proof!

The bathroom is the only space I am still not satisfied with -since we had the worst contractor- but that’s a subject I will discuss in another blog post!

I have plans for our home that we will still need to execute so we can have more -and better- storage solutions but until then, this is a before and after blogpost for all the spaces that we have almost completed.

The only thing I can assure you from experience is: you can totally change a home on a budget! Don’t be scared to get yourself a first home that is not exactly your “dream home”. You just need something decent to work on and it is completely normal to make many mistakes on the journey, but it’s all an experience that you will remember forever! You’ll need a lot of patience! Things don’t just happen over night. For example: we got an oven after 3 months and the chandeliers after 1 year.

Life is hard as a newlywed couple. You don’t realise how hard the responsibility of sharing costs are, but as someone that had no idea how to EVER get anything done without a budget I believe I haven’t done too bad? Also, you won’t even notice how far you have come until you look back at all your blessings! I never thought our home would turn out to be this beautiful. The delay in moving in was a blessing itself as I had the time to discover my style and to find items that matched and I was content with. I am proud of what we created with my husband working as team!

If you are going through the same struggle right now, I promise it’s going to all fall into place!

What do you guys think? Would you like me to take you on a "before and after" tour of each room? I could go more in detail per room!

I’d love to know!

Much love,

Sinem