How We Renovated a Little Cottage

Cottage Core, Granny Chic and Grandmillenial style are all the rage in home interior decorating circles at the moment. Houses are being decorated with second-hand furniture and accessories that are revamped. I love a minimalist version of this decor style and our little cottage renovation in the city is a good example of how you can recreate a cottage look using a blend of new and old.

Our Cottage Renovation in the Beginning

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We bought our 1850’s cottage in the city as a way to move home from WA while our home there was still on the market. We did not want to spend a lot of money, so we found this cute little place that we knew we could turn into a lovely home.

When we moved in, the plan was to renovate the tiny kitchen and bathroom. We had to kneel down to fit under the showerhead! The toilet was outside in an outhouse. I spent a long time while the settlement was going through developing what was basically a tiny house layout for the kitchen and bathroom. The ended up looking lovely but little did we know the money it would take to get to that end.

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The First Disaster of the Cottage Renovation

Our cottage renovation was far from smooth, as you might have guessed. It began when we removed a built-in shelf (made from Craftwood) and discovered rising damp what was so wet it was running down the walls. This led to a floor being ripped up in the lounge and then half of the dining room floor being ripped up to make one good, original floor.

It was like the domino effect after that. I came home from work one day to find a tarp covering the entire back section of the house. (All five metres wide). Gavin and the builder had begun demolition of the bathroom, discovered that was all rotten too and we promptly had to rebuild the house! It took seven weeks for the new bathroom to be at a level where we had a toilet. I was so desperate to leave my parent’s house by then, I didn’t care if we had no kitchen. We moved in with appliances stacked around us in the lounge, microwave on a chair and a coffee machine connected by extension cords to the table. We had no floor in the dining area at one stage so had to jump joists to get up the stairs to bed.

The Finished Cottage

Our renovated cottage came to life exactly as I’d imagined. We had walls painted in China White by Dulux with Vivid White trim. I love Vivid White. It’s crisp and fresh. It goes with almost any colour scheme. I added custom damask curtains for texture in the lounge and a printed roman blind in the bedroom. We left the kitchen window bare as there were no privacy issues.

To add to the cottage feel, I painted all our old timber furniture white. I didn’t distress it as I don’t like the look. The white matched well with our trims and kitchen. It provided a clean backdrop to add pops of colour with china and other accessories such as our modern artwork and my large clock. This clock is now over the mantel in the farmhouse. The dresser is stripped back to natural timber and lives in the kitchen. To complete the kitchen, we customised an Ikea flatpack by painting the doors to match the walls. We also built custom open shelving with decorative corbels. A custom breadboard fits in the top of the sink to add extra bench space and any gaps were made into vertical shelving.

The Next Steps

The bathroom was fully functional at 1.75m long and 1.2 metres wide. It was not much longer than the length of the bath! To maximise this tiny space we removed the bath and installed a toilet. I used a bedside table as a vanity and we put in a tiny but full-sized sink. The shower was also full size and we used the heated towel rail on the wall to provide heat in the tiny room. I wanted this room to be like a jewel box when you slid back the door. To achieve this we had the entire room tiled with swimming pool mosaics! The bright blue was offset with all the crisp white.

The upstairs of our cottage was the only room that didn’t require a lot of work. I painted it our and we added blinds to the skylights. Sleeping in that room in bright light was not fun, believe me! I carried the whole house scheme upstairs with pops of yellow and red. These colours came from the vintage fabric in the roman blind.

The Exterior of Our Cottage

The courtyard at the back of the cottage was covered in rotted decking when we bought the house. This was removed when we moved the toilet inside. We replaced it with a new low retaining wall and a couple of stairs. The area was then filled with crushed sandstone. We changed the outdoor loo into a little laundry and tidied up the shed behind it to hold tools and our dogs’ bed. We were also able to add a garden in the form of tubs and a raised bed around the perimetre. This doubled as seating. For extra colour we bought vintage boxes and attached them to the brick party wall dividing the cottages. We filled these with flowers and trailing plants.

Our cottage renovation took ten months, start to finish. We spent around $45000 but that included new lights, floor, kitchen, bathroom, curtains, paint, skylights and all the outdoors. We also installed a new hot water system and heating. Which shows you CAN have a lovely home on a budget if you’re willing to do a lot of the work yourself.