How to make your home fit for two

There is very little advice available on how to prepare your home for cohabiting with a partner. It can be, however, a testing time – after all, they do say that you don’t know someone until you live with them.

Revamping your house or flat with two in mind will ensure that your partner and you settle in well to living together. It can be difficult to adjust to the changes that occur as you jump from single living to living as a couple. It’s commonly said that cohabiting can make or break a relationship – so it’s crucial to ensure that your home is cohabit-friendly to avoid any teething problems or petty arguments.

Sorting through your possessions and clearing out anything you can live without is a good place to start. Having storage space is crucial to your partner feeling welcome. Ensure that there is free wardrobe, drawer, bookshelf, kitchen and bathroom cupboard space.

The next step is to make sure that your home isn’t too tailored towards your tastes. Of course, your home will reflect your preferences – but if your taste is bright pink and it covers every wall in your home, it may be time for a rethink. Compromise is key to surviving relationships, so toning down any bold, consistent decoration will allow your new cohabiter to feel at home.

Money is always an awkward topic – but ensuring from the start that home insurance and bills are shared equally will avoid arguments later on. You could also evaluate your furnishings. For example, is your sofa big enough for two people to comfortably sit on? Is your breakfast bar long enough for two half-awake zombies to pour breakfast down their work clothes?

Before your partner moves in, decoration could also be something to consider – could you incorporate your relationship into your décor? Some simple frames containing photos of the two of you could make an intimate addition to a room and is cheap and simple to put up.

Think about your partner – is he/she particularly untidy? Investing in a towel rack could be an easy way around wet towels thrown on the bed? Or perhaps they always read before bed and you could add a lamp to your bedside table? Your home can be tailored slightly to meet your needs as a couple, whilst retaining its current aesthetics.

Finally, a little touch will go a long way. A present on the pillow, a favourite meal in the oven, any thoughtful touch will make your partner feel extra welcome when it comes to moving day. Lastly, don’t forget to cut a key!

How to wallpaper around a door

Following from my recent post, wallpapering around a window reveal this post continues on from that and will show how to paper around a door.

Where to start wallpapering

Before you start papering you need to work out where the paper comes to at the door architrave, to do this measure your roll of paper, then start at one corner of the wall with the door in it and mark the sheets from the corner to the door, then over the door and to the other corner, does this work out OK? What you are looking for is not to end up with a sheet falling just short of the door architrave and you having to fiddle about putting in a small strip. You may have to start with a half sheet from the corner to avoid this situation or it may just work out OK if your following the pattern around the room.

Once you have worked out the best place to start, use a plumb line or a level to mark a vertical line from the ceiling to the skirting board ensuring you allow a little paper to return around the corner by about 1cm.

Putting up the first sheet of wallpaper

Once you have pasted the first sheet of paper, line it up with your vertical mark on the wall and smooth out the bubbles as you go, trim the top and bottom and wipe any excess paste off the paper, continue doing this until you reach the door frame. One thing I always find easiest is to take the sheet of paper that is going to start to go around the door architrave, hold it up and match any pattern then mark the paper on the inside of the architrave then take the paper to the paste table and cut the bit that would go over the door off, this saves getting paste all over your door and frame and also can make it easier to handle.

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Stick or twist – making sense of when to jump into the housing market

Laura Buckley

I’m getting married next year, and while I’m very much looking forward to going around John Lewis to put together our wedding gift list, it’s made my fiancé and I think about whether we want a house of our own to move into after we get back from honeymoon. But it’s a difficult decision.

At £161,588 ⁱ, the average UK house price is running at more than six times what the average full-time worker earned in 2011 ⁱⁱ. But we live in London, and we’re not looking at buying an average-priced home. Even though we earn more than the average salary, it’s still been very hard to save up for what feels like an enormous deposit. We’ve found ourselves renting for years longer than we originally planned.

Renting’s been really expensive. The average rent for flats in the UK is now £833 per month – an all-time high according to the ibtimes. However, the flat we currently rent sets us back nearly £1,400 a month and, valued at around £385,000, chances are a mortgage on the property or one similar would cost us a lot less.

And while we’re fortunate enough to have saved up our deposit and to be able to afford the monthly mortgage payments, there are other considerations we’re still trying to weigh up before we decide to take the plunge.

Before the onset of the credit crunch in 2008, we used to watch TV programmes such as Channel 4’s Property Ladder and marvel at how easy it seemed to be to make a fortune out of bricks and mortar. The people on the show seemed to be earning juicy profits from buying and selling quickly in the rising UK property market. But since the global financial downturn took hold, it’s been clear to everyone just how risky investing in property can be. We’ve all heard the horror stories of people like us getting trapped in negative equity ⁱⁱⁱ just a few years after they bought their first home and now it seems that a big chunk of our generation of would-be first-timers have been put off.

We’ve had it drummed into us that buying property has to be a long-term investment, thanks to the cyclical nature of the market. We know that if we’re going to make a return on our investment, we may have to hold onto the home we buy for many years. We’ve been told to follow the experts’ advice and plan to hold onto our first property for at least five years in order to reduce the chances of taking a financial hit ^iv.

Weighing up the costs of home ownership versus the costs of renting has also been a bit of an eye opener. While we know that a mortgage on our flat might well be cheaper than the rent ^v, being liable for all the add-on costs that being a homeowner entails also seems a bit daunting.

Then there’s the insurance. As renters, we’re familiar with contents insurance, but when we buy, we’ll need home insurance – which covers the building itself, renovations to structure and fixtures and fitting.

We’ve read that nearly two million people in the UK don’t have home insurance and that means that even if damage is caused by someone else, they could lose everything ^vi. We know that home insurance is an essential part of having a mortgage and it will give us peace of mind when making the biggest purchase of our lives. But it’s another cost we’ve got to consider.

So it looks like we’ll be sitting on the fence a bit longer. We don’t want to rush it. But in the meantime, we’ll keep doing our homework ^vii and get our finances in order so that we can afford any unforeseen expenses and can make sure that we won’t overlook the essentials such as home insurance.

References

1. http://www.landreg.gov.uk/house-prices
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/nov/23/uk-household-earnings-fall
3. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2061552/Young-buyers-trapped-homes-Bought-property-peak-years-ago.html
4. http://moneyning.com/housing/the-five-year-rule-for-buying-a-house/
5. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-2093026/Plunging-mortgage-charges-house-prices-mean-owning-home-cheaper-renting–1-400-year.html
6. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17412996
7. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-1598286/First-time-buyers-Shortcuts-mortgage-buying-house.html