Every home and every family have their own story, so do we.

It would be interesting to collect all the home stories in one place, if you ask me it would be one very cool and useful read.

So let’s start from the beginning.

Offcourse, it all began from finding the right location. Maybe unusual but I fell in love with this big pine in front of the house.

Offcourse we considered every aspects of the location like town connections, school proximity, the price, position and the potential of the house, but the tree was like cherry on top.

The house was semi finished, with wood flooring and tiles installed at the ground floor, but the loft was complete row state with nothing but bricks and roof. In order for us to move in, we had to complete the bathroom with sink, shower and furniture, and the same with the kitchen. But for the budget reasons we decided to go with the cheapest options in that time, so we also kept a lot of furniture that came with the house. We knew it was temporary, but unfortunately the temporary lasted a lot longer than expected because investing in house can really deplete all recourses.

TO DO list was long and exhausting and with time it only grew longer. Same as the deadlines that we set for ourselves till the completion of individual projects, and at the same time till the full completion of our home.

It I tell you that now even after 12 years in, we still haven’t finished all we wanted, you could easily say that the statement “House is never ending story” is true. But, however nothing is that simple. In that years of our life we planned the wedding, had our two children, changed job positions, went through health problems, struggle with parenting and partnership challenges and many more… Huge part of constructions we did all by ourselves, some with the help of family members, witch by itself brings time as the main cost. Especially in time when life is at it’s peek, with raising children and both having full time jobs.

We learned a lot, not just skills like plastering the walls, painting, furniture assembling, time management but more about patience, unreal expectations, adaptability and flexibility, in short about ourselves and how we function in stress conditions.

Many times I imagined would it be better if we took a loan and put our house under mortgage and finished faster, but I realized on the way that sometimes making a lot of decisions in short time frame can turn to a disaster also. So, we accepted the decision we made and tried to make the most of it.

Ofcourse thist doesn’t have to be your story.

Smart planning, awareness of the job scale, good preparation and education can lead to faster and overall better result. I have to admit that we rushed into all of it unprepared and immature, and because of that we made a lot of mistakes along the way. But if you are smart you will learn from your mistakes, and if you are smarter you will learn from other people mistakes.

So I decided to help you learn form my experience so you could avoid some of the mistakes we made.

The biggest investment was installing new windows and doors through the house, facade isolation, central heating and reverse the layout of the home in uncommon way.

So here is common to have living and kitchen space on the ground floor of the house, and upstairs is ussualy where the bedrooms are. But we got the idea to reverse that layout and put our bedrooms downstairs on the ground floor so we can have wider an more open living space in loft area. We would get better view from higher level and more natural light. Many didn’t understand our decision at the time, some even tried to make us change our mind, but we were determined. We now agree that it was the best decision we made.

So, don’t be afraid to think outside the box.

By shifting the living space up we got to enjoy this view of the wood behind our home every day. And it’s everyone’s favorite place of the house because of constant changing it’s look depending on the time of the year or weather conditions.

The loft was an empty canvas so we got to chose how to organize the layout that suited us the best.

There was a lot of work but it was enjoyable.

As a huge fan of wood and natural materials I new in which directions we wanted to go. So we choose hardwood oak flooring, witch continued through the kitchen countertop and bathroom furniture. For the kitchen cabinets I chose the sandy colour of the fronts because I wanted timeless and simple look but didn’t want it all white. So this added a extra warmth in, as well.

Having in mind the space we had, it was natural to divide it into different zones, so we created zone for relaxation and hanging out, and also behind the sofa is a work zone with large office table that I build. This space often serves as a playground for kids.. So it’s multipurpose at it’s best.

Considering the low ceiling hight and that I didn’t want the open shelfing at that time, I chose to put the low high but long wall cabinets that opens up towards ceiling for that extra storage space. I’m very happy how the kitchen turned out, and how it serves us for over seven years now.

The dinning space is just near the kitchen and I left it quite simple without much details for easier maintenance.

The ground floor is now dedicated for more intimate space and bedrooms, with laundry room and storage room.

Kids bedroom is on the sunnier side of the house just because they spend more time in their rooms than us.

More about bedrooms will be in some other post, because this turned too long for now.

Hope you find this short story of creating our home interesting and that you can extract something useful for yourself on your journey.

Until the next time…

Nataša