I must admit when we bought out current home I thought “this is it, we have everything we need in this house” but then you move in and you live with it all for a while and you have more children, new furniture and suddenly it doesn’t feel so spacious anymore.
One of our biggest issues at the moment is with our dining room/kitchen. As a family of six we no longer fit around the kitchen table without bringing in extra chairs and ‘squashing up’. We do have a dining table which seats 6 but it’s carpeted in there so it’s not great for our messy eaters who tend to drop chocolate milk, tomato ketchup and strawberry jam as if they are trying to create some kind of ‘floor art’.
Our dining room has become my ‘office’ and the house of homework as that is where there is the largest surface to spread out on as well as the family PC. At Xmas and other family get-togethers we struggle to fit everyone in as you can see from our make-do dining room last Christmas.
Our ‘dream’ is to knock down the wall between our kitchen and dining room to create one large kitchen/diner and tile from the front door all the way through to the kitchen/diner to make everywhere cleaner and easier to maintain. This would enable us to buy a dining table which extends so as to accomodate extended family on special occasions and to make life easier for me as the children get older. I would be able to get on with my jobs in the kitchen whilst keeping an eye on them doing their homework. I think as a family these days you need that kind of open-plan living to keep your family dining/working and just being together.
In addition to that we need to replace the carpets in the bathrooms with floor tiles, install built-in wardrobes in our bedroom to complete our bedroom makeover which we started earlier this year and the playroom is starting to look tired too so we need to rethink what we do in there but it all takes time and money that at the moment we just don’t have.
If you have any home improvements that you could do with a little help with in getting started then Swinton are the guys for you as they are looking to help people and the communities they live in by offering cash prizes of up to £5,000 to complete projects that matter to them this summer. Starting from Monday this week, Swinton will run four exciting competitions over a five-week period: the home project (week one), the garden project (week two), the DIY neighbour project (week three) and the community project (week four).
Here’s the top line detail of this week’s competition:
- Nominate a home project you’d like to see completed in your home for the chance to win £1,000
- All entries will automatically be entered in to our prize draw to win £100
- Winners will be chosen at the end of this week and contacted via email
Readers submit their entries here by filing out our competition form to nominate a home project they’d like to see completed this summer. Please also see T&Cs.
Well, what are you waiting for?