Anna and Adam's beautiful home is packed with thrifty bargains and designer furnishings that they bought for a fraction of the retail price, all thanks to some smart bargain hunting!
Read on to discover how they renovated and expanded their wonderful family home near Oxford.
Feature by Becca Cullum-Green. Photography by Dave Caudery.
I’m Anna, 35, and I live with my husband, Adam, and two children. I work in social media marketing. You can see more of my home style at @theinteriorframe.
Where I live
Our home is a 1930s, three-bedroom, semi-detached property in Oxford. We bought the house five years ago.
What I wanted to change
When we moved in, the house wasn’t in good shape and hadn’t been decorated in a very long time. There was lots of woodchip, bright red carpets and a tiny kitchen and bathroom. We knew we needed to change everything, but the priority was the kitchen and bathroom.
How I made it my own
Once we had the basics like the rewiring done, we decorated room by room. Most of the furniture we had was secondhand so we could save for bigger jobs. I would’ve loved to buy everything new, but that wasn’t an option for us, so most things were sourced from eBay or Facebook Marketplace. I think this helped make the house feel more like us as things were collected over time, and most pieces have a story.
My favourite part
Everyone loves the kitchen! It’s probably the best part of the house and is the room everyone wants to spend time in. But I really love our bedroom. It’s a great size and is dual aspect, so it gets lots of natural light.
‘Before moving to Oxford, we lived in Manchester, where the houses are a lot cheaper. We moved for work and were shocked by the house prices, and we ended up searching for the right place for years while renting.
I knew this was the house for us because, even though the house itself needed almost everything done to it, I still had such a good feeling about it.
Most of the rooms are double aspect, so they get lots of natural light throughout the day. Plus, the front and back gardens were beautiful, and the area is just perfect for us as a family.
There was a lot of work to do, with jobs like getting the whole house rewired and removing all the 1970s gas fires. Next, we removed the woodchip, which felt like it took forever! Then we finally got to decorating.
All the doors in the house had hardboard nailed to them to make them plain and flat. Once we worked that out, we took all of the boards off and revealed the original doors underneath.
The most recent project we finished was the front door. The old one was awful and I suspected, like the other doors, that this had hardboard nailed to it. One day, I convinced my husband that we should take it apart, and we found the original 1930s front door underneath.
With help from a fantastic carpenter, we were able to restore it and I’m so glad we found it. Sometimes, you have to get a bit curious!’
Kitchen
‘We extended the kitchen, so we had a lot of design input for this space. We didn’t want to put an overly modern extension on the house, and instead wanted something that would suit the age of the property,’ explains Anna.
The kitchen is from DIY Kitchens but Anna sourced the appliances and worktops elsewhere to save money. The couple decided against having a separate utility, preferring to have a larger kitchen space instead. Anna added other elements to make the kitchen feel more bespoke, like a boxed-in extractor fan and open shelving.
The shelves themselves are actually old windowsills from an Oxford University college that she found at the local wood recycling centre. ‘They were cheaper than scaffolding boards and have a lovely warmth and history to them,’ says Anna. The black Crittall-style doors at the back allow plenty of natural light to flood the space, and provide easy access to the garden.
Dining area
‘This room had 1970s alcove units when we moved in, and they were pretty ugly. We wanted to rip them out and replace them, but we managed to remove the bits we didn’t like and salvage the useful parts, which were the bottom cupboards,’ explains Anna.
‘We finished the cupboards off with quartz tops that were offcuts from our kitchen, so it didn’t cost us anything extra. The one closest to the table is crammed with kids’ art stuff and the other one is filled with booze! The shelves above them are the huge old windowsills from the wood recycling centre.’
She picked up the dining table on eBay for just £11. It was covered in paint, but she managed to strip it and realised it was made out of oak. The light over the dining table was secondhand and Anna purchased it before they bought the house, while the wall lights are from Pooky.
Living room
‘One of the first things we did when the essential work was done was to have a wood burner installed, which made this room so cosy. When we moved in, there was one door at the back of the room and it had mushrooms growing out of it!’ says Anna.
‘We could tell it originally would have been a set of French doors, so when we were ready to replace the door in here, we wanted to put French doors back in. They totally transformed the room and I’m so glad we didn’t just put in a big glass door.’
Anna’s biggest bargain was the footstool: ‘It’s a leather design from Laura Ashley that I got from eBay for just £3.’
Office
The office is attached to the kitchen and is the perfect space downstairs to shut out the rest of the house and get work done.
‘We decided to colour-drench this room in a deep, rich green. I love the colour and feel that it’s made the room feel snug and calm, which is perfect for focusing on work. Like a lot of the fixtures in this house, the shelf was from the wood recycling centre and was only a few quid,’ says Anna.
Main bedroom
Anna had her eye on House of Hackney’s monkey-print wallpaper for a long time. ‘It was something I obsessed over for years! I loved it but it was firmly out of my price range.’ However, she kept her eye out for it online: ‘I ended up buying someone’s leftover rolls on eBay for a bargain price. We put it up years ago and I’m still not bored of the monkeys. I’d cover the whole room in monkey wallpaper if I could!’ she smiles. Anna won the House of Hackney tiger cushion in a competition.
‘Pretty much everything else in the bedroom was sourced secondhand,’ she says. Everything from the bed, which I picked up for just £25, to the big lamp, which was £9 from Oxfam.’ The walls in the bedroom are painted in Skimming Stone by Farrow & Ball.
Bathroom
‘The bathroom used to be tiny. If someone opened the door while someone was on the toilet, the door would hit the knees of the person on the loo!’ says Anna. ‘This was because there was a huge boiler cupboard next door but, luckily, we were able to knock through so that the bathroom gained the space of the boiler cupboard. This completely changed the room and made it so much nicer to be in.’
Anna used an antique washstand for the sink unit, which she bought on eBay for £30 many years ago. It has moved around several properties with her, and was actually used in the kitchen in their last home as an extra work surface.
Kids' bedroom
‘This was the first room we finished,’ says Anna. ‘Both of my children were babies when I did it, and I hand-painted clouds on the ceiling and used large stickers from Chocovenyl to decorate the walls.’ Her simple DIY makeover has proven to be a hit with her two children.
‘I’ve actually tried to redecorate this room a few times, but the kids won't let me! They also each won’t let the other one have the room, so they have no other choice than to share it.’
What I learned
- Be really clear about what you want from tradespeople. Diagrams and example photos go a long way and I think they’ve saved us from things going wrong a few times!
- We had to live with the house as it was for a while, which I hated, but looking back I think it helped us get to know the house better and how we wanted to use the space.
- As we did a lot of the work during lockdowns, we had to choose a lot of things without being able to go and see them in person. If we’d been able to go to showrooms, I think we would’ve chosen a few things differently, and saved a lot of money on samples.
