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At the start of the year we decided to start a family bucket list. Traditionally a bucket list is a list of experiences you want to achieve in your lifetime. Ours was more of a shared place to list all the activities and places we weren’t able to visit over the last few years due to the pandemic.

Keeping a family bucket list

We keep our family bucket list as a shared list so we can all access it and add to it via our phones and tablets. If we have a spare day then we can look at our list and choose somewhere to go. It is so satisfying crossing off an activity and helps us be a little more accountable with our time as well as planning home improvements and longer term projects. Over the last few months we’ve enjoyed weekends away, tried new recipes, and been to places we’ve wanted to go for ages.

Our bucket list isn’t only days out and experiences. Oh no, it’s amazing places to eat and things we want to do in our house and garden too. Over the last few years we’ve enjoyed doing up our suburban family home. This year it’s been about improving the upstairs office, bedrooms and stairs. The old vinyl flooring really needed replacing and we wanted to update the look and feel of the house. We were researching interior design dark wood floors which suit our modern home well. Dark wood can be hard and durable, which are great features for a family home. 

Bucket list ideas for the home

We had fun going to see samples of flooring, we even borrowed a sample book for the weekend! Thankfully we were able to move quite quickly. We chose the flooring of our dreams and were able to book in the work for a few weeks time. Although it wasn’t fun clearing the rooms of furniture – is it ever!- it was totally worth the tidying and cleaning. I left the house one morning for work – returning to my gorgeous new floors. The installers worked hard and even cleaned up after themselves.

It wasn’t just the floors we wanted to update. We also wanted to be bolder with our choice of colour in the house. We bought interior magazines, scoured Pinterest and nosied around our friends’ homes until we hit on the perfect colour for us. We purchased a few sample pots so we could paint some test patches and make sure it was the right one. Then we painted one wall of our bedroom dark blue. This was a pretty bold colour choice for us but we love it. It compliments the wooden floor and makes for a calm and peaceful space.

Our choices were inspired by a recent stay in an Airbnb property in the old town of Hastings. It was my dream property – a beautiful old Victorian house on the winding High Street, above a quirky, independent interiors shop. It featured original wooden floors and fireplaces, high ceilings and sea views. The rooms were large and spacious and it had been decorated in my style – a cool 1920s inspired vibe with bamboo framed pictures, huge statement pieces of wooden furniture and bold choices of colour. It all worked so well and had me dreaming of living in a Victorian villa by the sea.

We returned to London and our 1980s modern house with a bump, but were inspired to see how we could adapt our home to make it more homely. Wooden floors and experimenting with colour is one way of bringing a little of the glamour of our holiday let to our home. I’m sure there are more things we can do and I’ve started a Pinterest board to save some of my ideas.

Moving is out of the question right now but I would love to replace some of our Ikea furniture for more quirky pieces of furniture. Our living room is next on the list for updating. We actually painted the open plan walls white a few years ago but we’ve both been inspired to go for originality over off the shelf. Our living room is lovely and light so it will take almost any colour. Thankfully we already replaced the flooring but it’s time to change the large bookshelves and ugly TV unit for something which suits our taste.

Now we’ve lived with the colour feature wall in our bedroom for a few months, I know we’ll be able to bring more colour into our home downstairs too. It’s fun making your house a home, and our bucket list definitely helps keep us on track!