When we moved into our first married home together six years ago, my husband and I chose a brand new spanking house that had just been built by the Twigden builders and obviously needed nothing doing to it. I love new houses for their modern crisp look and for the fact that they are ready to move into and you do not need to do any decorating to them. We even got to choose some of the decorations ourselves such as the colours of the tiles and things like that. I would love to buy a run down home in the future and do it up ourselves but for that time in our life when we were both working long hours in London a new home was just what we needed.

Fast forward about four years and a new home definitely needs some touch ups. The paint that the builders used was quite a low quality paint so it came off quite easily. We found that if there was any mess on the walls if we tried to rub it off with a damp cloth the paint would come off too so that wasn't good. Also, a new house is quite a plain blank canvas of plain white walls and so a few years in you want to add your own stamp to it and do something different with it.

When we started to decorate we did a number of things that I think are a good idea and worth sharing with everyone.

We decided to add a feature wall to our living room. We have a fireplace with a section of wall that juts out so this was perfect to become a colour of some description to add some decoration to the the room. We sort of had an idea of the colour we wanted, either a nice teracotta red or a purple shade of some description. So, what we did was go to our local B&Q and get some paint pot samples after deciding on some colours we had see. You have to pay for the paint pot samples but its only a couple of quid and then they are yours to keep. Then we painted on each colour onto a section of the wall in question and left them there for a few days to see which colour would work and which didn't work in the room and which we really did or didn't like. We even left them up when our friends came round to get their opinions too. I always thought I would want the teracotta shade but once it was up I fell in love with the purple colour we chose and now its on our wall and looks lovely. One tip I would definitely give is to keep a little bit of the paint you have painted the wall as about a year later we made a mark in the paint, chipping a little bit off so it exposed the white colour underneath but as we had kept the little sample pot we were able to touch this up and it looked as good as new again. 

Another thing that really helped us and shortened the time of our house painting was by using rollers instead of paint brushes. We had a lot of white walls that we just wanted to repaint and I had never done anything like that before. We covered our floors with lots of old sheets and towels to make sure we didn't get any drips but with a roller it's a lot cleaner than a paint brush and we had hardly any spills. I also think a roller is a lot easier to use as you can cover a big amount of wall with just a few rolls and I think it gave a much nicer look and finish once we had completed the job. The rollers also worked really well when we came to do the ceiling as we could just reach up and roll and the action was quite smooth. A good tip is to have a big roller and then a small roller for the smaller jobs such as round light sockets and things like that. I would also say its very handy to have a wet cloth very handy because if you do have any spills you can just mop them up quickly and not make a mess.

Try if you can and decorate during the spring/summer months when you can keep the doors open as this means the smell of the paint will fade quicker and also the paint will dry a bit quicker too although you can buy quick drying paint which did dry fairly quickly and I was quite impressed with it. We painted for a couple of days and then went away for a few days so we gave time for the walls to really dry before we were in the house again and I also think this helped a great deal.

A few fun decorating tips!!