Happy New Year! Well 2019 started with a bang over here in TYH HQ, with our first ever newspaper spread being published on the 19th of January!

 Having an article published in The Yorkshire Post was a huge milestone for us, it was a reminder of what we had achieved in less than a year (pretty much a whole house & garden revamp!) and it is something we can look back on in years to come and say…look what we did!

I will give you a bit of a back story to how we started our journey as I don’t think I have ever written about it before! I was 22 and Olly was 23 when we bought the house in late 2017. We moved in on the 5th of January 2018 and I turned 23 at the end of January. Neither of us had gone to uni, we both jumped straight into apprenticeships, saved a little and then met each other at 18, we continued to save while enjoying holidays and everything that young people do! At 22 and 4 years of being together and after the decision that we wanted to live together Olly proposed to me! We then got off our butts and got serious about house hunting, it was in the October of 2017 that we found the house we wanted and after 2 viewings 2 days in a row we put in an offer, it was our third offer that got accepted and we couldn’t have been more excited!

So here we are today, 1 year on. And now planning a wedding…

I honestly can’t believe how fast last year went, we blinked and it was suddenly 2019, we achieved so much in that time.

• We stripped & painted the living room, hall way & bedroom
• We painted the spare room/my office & kitchen
• We re-landscaped the garden & painted the fence, shed & furniture
• We upcyled the built in wardrobe doors to make them look like shaker style doors & painted them white, with new handles
• We replaced & painted all of the internal doors

When The Yorkshire Post came to see us it was late November, everything was pretty much finished yet a lot has changed again since! We had got to this point in 11 months, tired didn’t even cover it! I think we are still recovering!

It was great to talk about our achievements but there are a few things that I have learnt for next time. I also had a lot of questions asked about the process & how we made it happen. I thought I would answer some on here!

Did you contact The Yorkshire Post?

I was approached through the contact page in my blog and asked if we would take part in an interview & photo shoot, it was all very casual and was arranged via email.

Did you have to sign a contract?

No it was very casual, though I wish I had asked more questions in the first stages as not much was explained.

How did you prepare?

Honestly, I didn’t, I did a lot of worrying over it though! Was it the right thing to do? Did I really want people to see our house in this much detail? Were we ready?! Next time I would make a list of what we wanted to talk about and talk to each other about what we DON’T want to talk about, it would have helped as we couldn’t for the life of us remember what we had talked about due to all the nervous energy, you won’t get to see a draft as we had assumed.

Did you get paid?

Ha! No! To be honest we didn’t expect that! We didn’t even get a complimentary copy…

Did you get to approve the article & pictures?

Again, no. We were told that no good magazine or newspaper gave copy approval. Which was news to us as we thought it would be common courtesy to be able to see it before going to print to ensure we were 100% happy with it. A lot of people who asked were shocked at this, we were too, it then opened up a whole new set of worries!

Were you pleased with the article?

Yes, it was a good write up. Our families were over the moon & really proud of us! I just wished they had used better pictures of me, they were highly unflattering, and I can a sure you I don’t look like that in real life! #thosechins

It was a good experience and great to see all of our hard work and efforts in print! The article isn’t online from what I can see but if it does get published on The Yorkshire Post website I will be sure to post a link!

Until next time…

Kelly & Olly