With any luck, Alex and I will be completing on our first owned home in the next couple of weeks, and I'm itching to get started on only part of this whole grown-up getting-a-mortgage thing that doesn't make me slightly terrified - the decorating!

I grew up watching shows like House Doctor and Changing Rooms (side note: I miss Changing Rooms. Can we please bring it back?) with my mum (and dad, although he was a more reluctant audience member), and we moved a few times when I was little, so decorating/planning rooms has been part of my mental make-up for as long as I can remember. Then, at uni, I discovered blogs like Manhattan Nest and Door Sixteen, and became slightly obsessed with the idea of buying a run-down old place and completely revitalising it. Our new house in no way fits that description (even in my most idealistic moments I understand that you need more amounts of money and time than we have at our disposal to take on that sort of project), but it does need a bit of TLC to get it to the aesthetic levels of my dreams.

Prior to our current flat, my decorating muscles had only been flexed as far as my childhood and teenage bedrooms, and in the flat itself we were limited by space and landlord restrictions. Now I'm going to have a whole house to play with, and my decorating muscles are ready to go full The Rock.

And the room I'm most excited to start with? The kitchen. If all goes to plan and our prayers to the conveyancing gods are answered we'll have a month or two between when we get the keys to the new house and when the lease on our flat runs out, and it makes sense to use that time to get as much decorating done as possible while we don't have furniture etc. in our way. The kitchen seems like a no-brainer place to start to me, as memories of five of us eating meals for a month out of a microwave, camping stove and mini-fridge in the conservatory while my parents' new kitchen was fitted tells me that the kitchen is the biggest pain to make any changes to when you also need it to be functional. Of course, we won't be doing anything like as major as refitting, but it will still be nice to get the work out of the way before we start filling cupboards and so on.

So, without further ado, for your viewing pleasure (and, let's be honest, mainly for mine) I give you my top kitchen inspiration ideas, all taken from my kitchen Pinterest board.

Two-tone cabinets

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to revamp anything is to paint it a different colour - and that truth is doubly, triply applicable to kitchen cabinets. I imagine painting the doors etc. that are already in the new kitchen will be one of the first things we do. I really like the darker-on-bottom, lighter-on-top look that's all over the Pintersphere at the moment, and one of the main things I want to bring to the kitchen is lots of brightness - as my mum pointed out, in typical mum fashion, the first time I showed her the listing for the house, the kitchen is the only room that doesn't have a direct source of natural light (it's attached to a little sunroom that brings all of that in, so it isn't completely in the dark!).

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Trendy AF, but also, practical - as long as you keep the dust off. As I said, we won't be refitting the kitchen any time soon, and though it has easily three times more storage than our current kitchen(ette, really - think oven, sink, four cupboards three drawers and less than a foot of useable prep surface) you never know when you might need more! Plus, what's the point of having cute mugs/crockery etc. if you have to hide it away all the time? I'm particularly loving the wallpaper backing and copper mug rack on the second image down at the moment. Which brings me nicely to...

Source Source Source Also very 'in' right now I know, but I can't help it - Tamatoa is my spiritual twin; I love shiny things. Gold handles (or 'hardware', as I believe the cool kids call them) make everything look a bit more glam, in my opinion, and will be easy to do with a can of spray paint. Blue cabinets Source

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Source Despite the fact that blue is apparently an appetite suppressor, you'll notice that it's in quite a few of my inspo images. Colour theory be damned, all of these poppy, not-quite pastel shades look gorgeous with gold and are really fresh - aka exactly what I'm going for. And finally, Chalkboard walls Source

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