Screen printer Hannah Carvel is one of Ideal Home’s newest Open House contributors, sharing her ideas on colorful home designs for creative family living. Check out the rest of his articles here.
I often find myself torn between scrolling through Instagram and flipping through the glossy pages of interior magazines, longing to transform my home. However, the reality is that there is no spare budget for renovations, a stark contrast to my past life.
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Despite this, I never shy away from a project. If a house is old, a little crumbling, and full of character, I’m immediately drawn to it. So when we moved to Somerset, we knew we wouldn’t be able to renovate, yet we would find something with charm. What we found was an old stone cottage or, more officially, a Somerset Long House.
We first saw him on a hazy summer day in June. We were three hours’ journey from Bedford, which circumstances compelled to make our move. But something felt magical about the house. Bathed in sunlight, with stone outbuildings and wildflowers peeking through cracks, I instantly fell in love.
(Image credit: Hannah Carvel)
That said, we haven’t made any offers since almost a year. We saw many more houses over the coming months, and as we returned home to pack up the life we knew, home never left my mind. Things felt especially dire when we finally put our town house on the market.
I was living through a full blown reno, thinking it would be worth all the junk and setbacks to make it our “forever home”, so knowing my new kitchen would have to go on the market before it was even delivered was hard.
I was numb to the oven I had picked up and the marble worktops fitted, but in these moments I found myself dreaming of living in a Somerset house. In my mind it became my desert island getaway.
At first we dismissed it as too different from our spacious Victorian town house, with its low ceilings and small galley kitchen. How we will fit our Furniture In, where will all our clutter go? But something about the house drew me back, so months after the initial visit we went again, this time with our kids, and we all agreed it was the one.
If we had to leave life we knew there was a new beginning behind it that we wanted and we would make it work.
In preparation for the move, I sold most of our furniture. My beloved big green dresser had to go, because it was too tall for the cottage ceiling. We passively disengaged, letting go of anything that didn’t fit into our new lives.
(Image credit: Hannah Carvel)
We went on a rainy day in February, a stark contrast to the sun-drenched scenery. The removal men arrived before us and immediately pointed out the leakage before we entered. And yet, it still felt magical.
That first evening, we lit a fire and sat among the boxes, feeling as if we had let go of some of the stress of losing jobs, changing schools, and upheaval. It was the beginning of something humble. No marble work tops or Quaker hot water taps but an old AGA and a sense of peace that money can’t buy.
Now, two years into our new life in Somerset, I can admit that in the first year we did almost nothing for the house. Instead, we lived. The kids settled into new schools, and we explored our surroundings.
With four acres of land, there’s always something to do, whether it’s tending to the garden, keeping chickens, growing. vegetables. We had to splurge and buy a second-hand ride-on mower – our town house plug in mower was quite literally not going to cut it!
We befriended a local farmer who occasionally brings his cows to graze on our farm, it’s lovely to see the calves with their heads over the fence in the spring.
(Image credit: Hannah Carvel)
Of course, the cottage quickly revealed its shortcomings. Wallpaper peeling, flaking colorAnd the occasional leak reminds us that it needs attention. But without a big work budget, we’ve learned to do and move slowly, even more accepting of changes.
Living with an AGA is a learning curve when you run out of oil in the winter and suddenly have no heat, or when a big tree blows down in a storm and blocks the way (you need to get out with a chain to move it ASAP), and for a septic tank… I won’t say much.
I replaced my old dresser with a small stripped pine found in the next village. I drew tired IKEA Kitchen units in a cheerful eggshell shade and updated handles for an easy budget refresh. I sanded back the dining room floor and painted the walls and window frames green. Every change is small, calculated and made over time.
(Image credit: Hannah Carvel)
There’s still a list of things I want to do, painting the living room, fixing the leak, but there’s no rush.
More often than not, our priorities remain outside: cutting and stacking logs for the winter or, more recently, planting the garden at the end of the garden. It will take years to mature, but putting down roots feels liberating and we are investing in our future here.
Old habits die hard and I still sometimes dream of making changes. A new drop last week Wallpaper from Vivienne Westwood and Cole & Son I was daydreaming about how I wanted to use it in my bedroom, what color paint I would pair with it, maybe I would paint the old beams in a red contrasting pillar box, light fittings and rugs that would look fabulous. But that’s not based on my reality (£310 per roll!!!) and actually, that’s fine.
Wallpaper that I used to daydream about
(Image credit: Mel Yates/Cole & Son/Vivienne Westwood)
We’ve painted a few rooms ourselves and we decorate with large quantities of daffodils and bluebells from the garden in the spring and fill vases around the house with freshly picked dahlias in the summer.
The lack of new tiles and wallpaper is fleeting while I feel the sense of peace that comes with living my country dream life is far from over – we still marvel at coming out at night and seeing the stars clearly in the sky.
(Image credit: Hannah Carvel)
I love waking up and stretching curtains Green fields and sometimes sheep. The starlings are currently in humming mode and we see and hear them flying over our house. It is pure magic.
I’m grateful for how lucky I already am when everything outside is so beautiful and life is full of other ways, including peeling wallpaper. I’m learning to be grateful for what we already have and to embrace the slowly and imperfectly evolving home.
