Our homes have been so much more than homes in 2020. We’ve worked from them, exercised in them and stood outside them and clapped the NHS. We’ve put our children’s drawings of rainbows in our windows and shared doorstep drinks with our neighbours. We’ve cleared out cupboards, painted walls and grown our own vegetables. In this series of blogs, we celebrate some of the ways our homes have helped us through the year – even if it wasn’t quite the year we were planning.

Making the best of a bad situation

If had a pound for every time ‘unprecedented’ was used to describe the events of 2020 then I would probably have enough money by now to raise a decent deposit and join everyone else who has used their experience of lockdown as motivation to find their next home. However, as it happens, I didn’t and we haven’t.

It’s fair to say that at the beginning of the year my other half and I were starting to get itchy feet. There was nothing particularly wrong with our house. It’s a three-storey Victorian terrace in the middle of Ipswich – close to the park and within easy walking distance of the town centre. It’s hugely convenient for both coast and country and it has been a good first home. But we’d been there for four years and it had started to feel like the time was about right to move on.

But then coronavirus happened and we were forced into a bit of rethink. I should start by saying that we were very lucky. We actually enjoyed our time in lockdown. We don’t have children (just one very excitable cockapoo), so we didn’t have to navigate the choppy waters of home schooling, both of us continued to work and none of our loved ones were at serious risk.

Instead we were able to slow down, take a look around our home and like so many others see what we could do to make the best of a bad situation.

Full disclosure: DIY and I are not natural bedfellows. I once got told by a wood work teacher that the sight of me holding a screwdriver was one of the scariest things he’d ever seen. To this day I’m still not quite sure what he thought I was going to do with it.

So it was with a fair degree of trepidation (not to mention a good number of self-help YouTube videos) that we decided to take the plunge and channel our energy into some home improvement and create something positive from what has been the strangest of years.

Admittedly I’m ever so slightly biased, but nine months on and I think we’ve done a pretty decent job. Every room has been given a fresh lick of paint – changing what was a tired looking ‘off beige’ bequeathed us by the previous owners to various shades, ranging from Bottlenose Dolphin and Howl at the Moon through to Rocky Shelter and Elephant in the Room. We’ve also damp-proofed the kitchen, installed some new skirting board and revamped the garden (which had become our dog’s personal playground).

I certainly don’t want to over egg what we’ve done – I’m aware that others have used the time to achieve far more important and noteworthy things. But with so much time to fill we’ve finally had an opportunity to put our own stamp on the house and create somewhere that feels even more like home. I’ve also gained a few extra skills to boot.

Every room now has its own story to tell and we’re looking forward to starting the next chapter. CR, Suffolk

Further information

This series of blogs is inspired by Savills new advertising campaign, To Every Home That's Been So Much More Than A Home – Thank You and Merry Christmas. Over the next few weeks a selection of guest bloggers will reveal just how much their homes have meant to them this year.