We’ve hardly taken any photos of the lounge over the past year as it’s pretty much been a dumping ground for all our stuff as the building works went on upstairs, before becoming a building site itself. We just closed the door and forgot it existed.

When we moved in, it was a fab big light room but we both instantly decided we wanted to knock the largest window through to create patio windows onto the side of the garden and it’s made a massive difference and Dougal can sit for hours looking out for rabbits. We also knew we needed to get rid of the old seventies brown tiled fireplace which our fire guy couldn’t believe had ever been allowed to be fitted it was so badly done. It was clearly so hideous we didn’t take any photos of it and neither did the selling estate agents.

We wanted a wood burner and, as it was the only room that didn’t have an original fireplace, we plastered over the random brickwork that had been done before and just put the fire by the wall.

The weirdest quirk to the room originally was that it had it’s own front door – with awful metal enforced glass and a random vestibule. We wanted to knock the whole thing out and create a window instead to match the others. Our plans we’re scuppered when our structural engineer discovered that the builders from 30 plus years ago had cut a few corners and had only put the enforcing beams as far as the vestibule rather than across the full room as they were supposed to. So if we wanted to lose all the vestibule, we’d have to do some major and super costly structural work.

We didn’t fancy that and thought we could perhaps put a desk in and make a mini work area. I’d also seen a cool cubby area where someone had hung a ski lift chair which I really fancied doing until we realised the ceiling wouldn’t hold it. It was destined to become a work area until Dermot joked that we could always turn it into a bar. Study area v bar is no contest so we now have a little bar area with drinks cabinet to save us walking all of an extra two metres to the kitchen.