Everything was all packed away in storage while we stayed with my husband’s parents – I didn’t realise you could miss eating out of your own bowls until I unpacked it all again! We spent so long going through all the boxes, sorting and organising our stuff, then getting rid of a whole lot of it. The only hard thing was finding out that our mattress had soaked up water and gone mouldy. I still haven’t got round to replacing it. I also had to get rid of huge quantities of paper and cards and envelopes after selling the stationery business. Handily, my mum's a teaching assistant and runs art clubs so she took loads of it for her school, so it went to a good home.

We were really lucky that when we moved in we didn’t need to do much work to the house. Nice fireplaces, good ceiling height, nice layout – it had all the basics! What we did do was paint the chimney flue in the living room, and the TV stand. The chimney flue had an ornate damask brocade-style wallpaper which totally wasn’t us, so we asked the landlord if we could paint it before we even moved in. He said yes and it was just the go-ahead we needed to apply. The navy blue with the lamp and the chair in the corner is one of my favourite little spots.