Proud owners of 17 paintbrushes, but no sofa.

Moving house is strange at the best of times, and stranger still when you’ve been happily settled somewhere with family, while owning a house you don’t actually live in and very few belongings to fill it (unless you count the random ‘one day we’ll need this’ purchases made during years of renovating – hello random small pots!).

You see, we sold most of our things when we moved the last time. We hadn’t got a new place lined up at that point, our old sofa was horrendously uncomfortable (James: “sliding off the front edge every time you sit down gets annoying very quickly”), and the house had a lot of built in storage. Plus, any family with young children will know that most of the ‘stuff’ you own belongs to them anyway…

So all in all, we hadn’t really appreciated until the time came to move into our ‘actual’ home that we don’t have a lot. Both a huge positive and a negative (as a chronic declutterer, I’m largely taking this as a win).

The week we moved out, I completed the almost ceremonial process of separating kitchen items with my mum – and it turns out that mingling kitchenware is a throw back to leaving student accommodation: there is an awful lot of “is this your veg peeler or mine?”, interspersed with “I’m sure you didn’t start with two sets of scales” – before agreeing that the toaster we arrived with 4 years ago should likely stay in the only home it knows. Although no, we haven’t replaced it yet.

So here we are, a few months in. We have a borrowed dining table, four chairs I bought at auction, and a very small jumble of mismatched furniture. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I could count our items of furniture on two hands. Fortunately the beds in the littles room are built-in, and I can’t wait to show you!

But what about those random purchases made in anticipation of having our own home again? Turns out it’s mostly candle holders and discount lampshades that we won’t ever need. So much for decluttering, but maybe this is what home looks like in the in-between — a few candle holders, some mismatched chairs, and the promise of everything still to come.

Any anyway, we’re covered if there’s a power cut!