Fitting our living room furniture into our new house.

*Collaborative post.

Finally the day came and we collected the keys to our new home! It’s been a busy couple of days – we officially got our keys on Friday and since then it’s been non-stop. Thankfully we’ve had aunties on standby to help us look after the kids and Mikey’s brother was around to help us to move some of the larger bits of furniture on the second day. We had quite a lot to move; we had our existing furniture, plus we had been shopping around on websites such as www.Sogeshome.com for new items that would suit our brand new home.

We moved the big pieces of furniture first.

We hired a van for the first day of our move and between myself and Mikey, we were able to get most of the larger pieces of furniture across from our old flat to our new house. I can’t tell you how horrible carrying two parts of a corner sofa down 6 flights of stairs is! I’m not the strongest of women and the sofas are ridiculously heavy. I think we did a pretty good job, all things considered. We managed to get everything down the stairs and into the van with relative ease, at least at the beginning of the day anyway!

Getting the sofas and other large bits down the stairs and into the van was only half the mission though. Although we didn’t have to contend with flights of stairs at the new place, we did have to get all the furniture in and then arrange it before we could really start putting anything else in it’s place.

The sofas were definitely not fitting through the front door.

We decided that there was absolutely no way we’d be getting through the front door with our sofa. Firstly, the turning is too tight; we’d never get the seats around the corner. Secondly, the architraves are quite chunky – it would have been handy if the house had narrower ones installed instead. With this in mind, we decided to walk all the way around the back of the house and bring the sofas through the back door. This meant we didn’t really have to contend with skirting boards and architraves for this part of the move – the last thing we wanted to do was damage the house, or the sofa, before we’d even got it inside. Bringing the sofas in this way made a huge difference, especially as it was just me and Mikey moving them! I’m definitely not as strong as him and it made the whole experience a little less stressful for the both of us.

Arranging our furniture – our house actually looks like a home.

Our huge corner sofa has now been split in two. It worked really well as a corner sofa in our old flat, however it looks much better after being split into 2 two seater sofas. The new living room is pretty much the same size as the old one, but thanks to the layout of the room and all the additional storage space the rest of the house give us, we’ve managed to make it look much more inviting. I’m really loving how our living room looks; it’s so cosy and inviting and I can’t wait to get everything in it’s place and have all the unpacking completely finished. I think it may be my favourite room in the house.

We have an alcove in our living room that we originally wanted to slot the sofa in to. It looked like it would be the perfect size, but unfortunately we didn’t take into account the skirting boards! It turns out this error of judgement might actually be a blessing in disguise as we now have the perfect little cubbie for our house plants, DVDs, ornaments and other special bits that we don’t want the kids to be able to get to.

We still have a long way to go before everything looks perfect.

I say perfect…it’s never going to look perfect – I have two kids! But having a house has been absolutely amazing so far and I am really enjoying arranging our furniture in a way that suits us and makes the house look great. With flats, you never really have much room to express yourself in and when you’ve got children as well, things can get really tight, really quickly. We’ve not been here for very long, but already we’re all loving having a house. Somehow, it just feels so much homely!

The way the house is laid out is just perfect for us and I know that we’re all going to love living here. I have been posting Instagram stories about the house move, so if you want to be nosey, you can follow me @gloryiscalling.