Hi there! Welcome to Little House On The Corner!
We’re Christine & Jan, aka. the dynamic duo of DIY, and we want to help you with your home improvement projects and help you create a home that you will love!
Have you ever been let down by a tradesperson? Or got a home improvement quote that was so much higher than you thought it would be? Have you bought a home that needs more work than you thought it would but no budget to do it?
Well, that’s exactly how our home improvement adventures and this blog started out!
We’d just bought our first home – an Edwardian semi in Manchester – and spent way more money than we could afford to be in the area we most wanted to live in. It was the worst house on the best street and it needed some serious TLC!
With no budget to do the work, progress was slow. We initially paid tradespeople to do some of the home improvement work but often the results weren’t as we’d expected and left our bank balance looking miserable.
We quickly realised that we’d have to get stuck in ourselves to get results we’d be happy with (and could afford). With no previous DIY experience, tackling a full-on house renovation seemed daunting, to say the least!
We started with small projects and quickly realised that most home improvements were much easier than we’d expected. Over the years, we managed to achieve more than we’d ever thought possible!
We’re now on a mission to help people with their home improvement projects. Here on the blog, we share everything we’ve learned along with helpful guides on how to complete hundreds of small and large home improvement projects. Just be warned, we don’t hold back here! This is real life, uncensored, nitty-gritty DIY. It’s not always pretty, it’s not always clean and tidy and it’s definitely not always Pinterest worthy. It’s our home and these are real-life DIY projects!
Why not check out our House Tour for our most current before & after pictures!
There’s always another DIY project just around the corner and we’re sharing everything we learned so that you can create your dream home, too!
DIY is much easier than you think, promise!
Over the last 7 years of DIY we’ve tackled everything from simple painting & decorating projects right through to much larger projects like sanding our original wooden floors & floorboards, building a slatted fence in the garden, restoring our Edwardian staircase and we even replaced our garage roof ourselves!
In September 2016 we made the huge decision to sell our Edwardian house and move onto a new home improvement project and we’re now renovating an art deco apartment in the centre of Berlin! Yep, we didn’t just move house, we moved country, too!
As always, we have countless home improvement projects ahead of us and we’ll be sharing all of our adventures, disasters and progress right here on the blog!
So grab yourself a cup of tea (or a power tool), make yourself comfortable and join us on our journey!
You can take the full tour of our homes here or check out some of our favourite projects here.
Want to get in touch?
We’re always here to help so please get in touch if you have any questions or you need any advice on your home improvement project! It really makes our day to hear from you, so please feel free to leave a comment or drop us a line and we’ll reply as soon as we can!
If we’re not blogging here (or stuck knee deep in a dirty project), you can also follow our adventures over on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Bloglovin’and Facebook.
Why not pop over and say hi! x
What a fantastic effort on this renovation, you guys must be super proud of your efforts. I guess you will be well on to your next renovation by now. Would be interested to know oif you have taken on any loft conversion projects?
Thank you, Freddie. We are always renovating and I’m pretty sure there will always be a new project on the horizon. Haven’t got round to a loft conversion yet though…
Cx
LOVE this! I am excited to read more of your site! We have some work to do on our place and this should be just the place I need to get inspired to get started!
Thanks! As always, there are lot’s more projects to come!
Cx
Great interior inspirations!!
Thank you!
Cx
You guys Rocked it! DIY renovating can be intimidating but look at all the great skills you have picked up! It’s ok to make mistakes. You learn how to fix them, am I right? It’s all good stuff! Thanks for sharing! This is an inspiratiion to homeowners all over the place!
Thank you so much, Renos!
Cx
Hello Christine and Jan!
I am an American living in Germany (I am in the Kassel area) My husband Jens and I just bought an Art Deco cottage in the country and are going through all the love-hate stresses of updating it. I am almost done sanding the stairs and your blog is giving me the motivation to tackle going whole-hog and completely sand down the risers, handrail, balusters and sides. If you can do it, I think I will survive it too hahaha.
We are also tearing down a wall to expand the kitchen and we’ll be replacing all the flooring in the kitchen and in two other rooms. We are also longing to re-plaster all the walls on the ground floor, but our budget might stop us on that one ;) I would say it is equal parts kinda fun /kinda scary.
It’s such a big deal when you buy a house with original features (the potential! the potential!) but lots of not so great past updates. The house deserves better, I just hope we can live up to it but also not really regret all the hard work we’ll have to do.
I just wanted to write and say howdy and also thank you for sharing your down to earth and very real experiences. Your projects really make me feel less intimidated by it all!
Cheers,
Lynne Marie
Thank you for your lovely message, Lynne Marie! Your home sounds amazing and I’m so flattered that we’ve been able to motivate you to tackle more of the work yourself! I’m not going to lie – our staircase took forever to strip and sand but it was so worth it!
I totally agree with you about it being fun and a bit scary at the same time. There’s nothing quite like the buzz you get when you finish a project and can say I did that!
Have fun restoring your home and we’re always happy to help if you have any questions!
Cx
PS. I always go to the Documenta in Kassel. It’s a beautiful city.
Hi guys. I can’t believe I have only just stumbled over your site but I am so pleased I have. Like Sherry above, I was searching for ideas on how to get rid of the pee smell from our little friends out of floorboards. What you have shared here is so much more. Over an hour later I’m still browsing through you’re site and all my other half can hear from me is ‘wow!’. I’m a part time ‘Maker’ of …… well, stuff really i guess with grande ideas of setting up a side line business. I’m really interested in up-cycling and currently working on making wine glasses from wine bottles and engraving them. I’m loving it. Next projects are going to be making bottle carriers, crates and small furniture items from wood pallets, some concrete items (candle holders, coasters, lamps and even a Game of Thrones dragon egg set that I’m half way through) and turning my Blacksmith’s old horse shoes into wine racks and other decorative things that I’ve not thought of yet ;) Keep up the great work, thanks for sharing all you have, huge well done on everything you have achieved so far and thanks for the inspiration. Best of luck to you both in you’re future adventures and keep us all posted! :-) x
Thank you so much for your lovely comment, Lee! It’s comments like yours that keep us motivated to keep sharing our experiences here!
Your upcycling work sounds amazing – I love the idea of horseshoe wine racks!
Thanks again and I hope you managed to get the smell out of your floorboards!
Cx
I am looking for how to get animal feces odor out my floor boards? I found your blog about bicarbonate & white vinegar! I’m going to try that, but have a question will this keep the animals from repeating in this area! It’s my mother-in-laws home & she had animals that went there prior so mine do now also! Or will I need to replace the floor boards?
It’s always worth a try because it’s an almost free thing to do and it worked great for us! I very much doubt that it’s something that would stop them repeating, though! Good luck with your floor, Sherry!
Cx