The Studio

If you read my recent post ‘Living Smaller’ you’ll know that I was feeling frustrated with life and my space and all that other mid life crisis stuff. We’ve calmed down a little bit since then, and decided not to make any major life changes for a little bit longer. We’re going to continue working on the house so it’s perfect when we do come to sell it, and just enjoy some time in the van during the summer. We’re definitely going to be doing something, whether it be majorly downsizing or buying another bigger van to convert, but for now we decided to change the house up a bit and try and be excited about it again.

We started off by having a massive declutter. We did a Sunday stall at Tynemouth market and sold off a lot of excess stuff, and I sold a few items of furniture. The house feels more minimalist now, and the extra money goes straight into the DIY fund.

We decided to do something a little unusual too. Steven paints, and I’m always mounting and framing prints, scanning film, and all sorts of things. All the equipment for these hobbies is quite visually messy, which isn’t relaxing to look at in your main living space. Which it all was, it was all crammed into our living room along with a huge sofa, our fire, our TV. It was all a bit much. We do have a spare bedroom but it’s small, and it’s already housing our clothes and ‘getting ready’ area.

So we decided to break the rules a bit. We thought we’d use the downstairs half of our home as our ‘living’ space. It’s bathroom, kitchen, living room, and now the bed, which has worked out incredibly well. It all feels a lot more soothing. We can have the fire on, read, watch a film, and sleep in the same room. We’ve never been ones for watching TV in bed so ‘switching off’ at night in the same room as it hasn’t been an issue. And honestly, there’s nothing better than falling asleep to the sound of a fireplace at night.

Our old bedroom is now our studio. It’s so much more practical. When I’m not at work I can spend the day upstairs ‘working’ and not having to worry about tidying everything up and having it look presentable when I want to chill out for the evening. Steven can have his paintings everywhere without me moaning that the bright orange portrait he’s just done is stressing me out. It' separates our home space from our work space.

Why is there an unspoken rule that you have to sleep in a particular room? Why does it have to be upstairs? If you’re an artist or a maker or you have a lot of hobbies and don’t want to rent an extra space, I highly encourage you to be creative with your home and turn your living room into a studio apartment.

 
 
 

Comrie Croft

We had a long weekend so we headed north to one of our favourite campsites, Comrie Croft. It’s a bit of a drive, just in between the Cairngorms and Loch Lomond, but it’s really worth it. We usually get to campsites late afternoon and just spend an evening there, before driving off after breakfast, but here we woke up, and spent an entire day wandering the campsite and walking in the surrounding woods. Absolutely no driving. Honestly, i don’t think we’ve ever done that before.

We arrived quite early and there were no other campervans there so we managed to get the best spot. Tucked right away at the end of the row of pitches, with a little stream outside our side door, and the firepit and bench outside our back doors. Through winter they have a pop up airstream cafe, run by Bonnie Mountain Coffee (who also have a land rover coffee bar, legends) who supplied us with coffee and bacon sandwiches all weekend, but they also have their own farm shop selling pretty much anything you could need for camping or a good dinner (veg and fruit all grown and handpicked at the bottom of the road).

Comrie Croft is a little oasis of calm and I could happily go back and spend a whole week there. We wanted to stay an extra night but the forecast warned us of snow and ice so we decided to play it safe and head a little bit closer to home for the last night. We’re planning on spending a fortnight in Scotland in April and I think a few of those nights will have to be spent back here.

 

Holy Island to St Abbs

We had originally planned a little one night trip to the lake district but after checking the weather forecast I thought it looked too windy. I can take rain, clouds, anythings. Just not wind. I have this bizarre fear that our van will tip over or my house windows will blow in or one of us will fly away into the sky, never to be seen again. I just don’t do wind.

Luckily, when you’re in a van, you can change your route very easily. We headed north up the coast instead, stopping at Holy Island for a coffee break and to stretch our legs. Sometimes I think we have more hours in the day then everybody else because in that very same afternoon we managed to drive even further north towards Canty Bay, to a little storage container cafe sat right on the cliffs, Drift cafe. Huge walls of glass let you look right out onto the sea while you sit in the warmth.

I’d found an overnight parking spot on the app Park4Night that had a lot of 5 star reviews, so we headed to St Abbs, a small fishing village on the very south eastern coast of Scotland. You can park right on the coast, looking out onto the rocks. All you need to do is pop a tenner and your reg into the box at the harbour master’s hut. Some people don’t want to pay for overnight spots at all, but for the view in the morning it was worth it, and it was totally quiet all night. Not another person in sight.