What we're dealing with - Our next house

In the 9 years my husband and I have been married, we have lived in 7 different rental houses, and in this coming January we will move into our 8th. As hubby's current career plan stands, we are due to move to our 9th house in 2014, our 10th in 2015, our 11th in 2017. You get the picture.

As much as I enjoy many aspects of our nomadic lifestyle, I crave a chance to create a home that reflects us, not just the builder's beige catalogue. I suffer severe itchy feet after a few months in a house, regardless of how much I am enjoying the location and new friends I have made.  I've realised that one of the reasons is because I can't wait to get to the next house, hoping it will be 'better' and feel more like 'ours'.

But when we get to the next house, my focus shifts and I start thinking about the next house.  I don't bother hanging pictures on the walls where we are, but I spend hours planning where I will hang them in the house next year. I want to STOP doing that. I want to start making my Dream Home NOW, wherever we are and whatever we live in.

So I want some ideas for really going all out with decorating a rental - big impact things I can do to walls and windows and kitchens and bathrooms - all of them easily reversed and taken with us to the next house. And when I say easily reversed - I mean EASILY, no repainting or patching walls or anything. I want to consider furniture and other major purchases that will work in different rooms and fulfil different functions in future houses. I've started to find lots of good ideas on Pinterest and around the web, and I want to start writing them all down here in some sort of organised way so I can actually use them! If someone reading this finds some of the ideas useful for themselves, I'll be doubly happy!

We have just locked in the house we will live in next year. We have been provided with a basic floor plan, and pictures of the front, rear, lounge, dining, kitchen, family, and rumpus room. No idea what's going on in the bathrooms - that's a bit worrying! I am sooooo excited, and have been pouring over that floor plan and staring at those tiny, actually-fairly-useless photos and dreaming of what might be.

So here is what we are dealing with:

And here are the pictures:

Front View

Backyard

Lounge Room

Dining Room

Family Room

Kitchen

Rumpus Room

It is that last room, the 5m by 5m sunny, carpeted rumpus room, that sold me on this house. Not that we had any other choices lol, but you know what I mean. The whole house may be incredibly boring beige walls and vertical blind yuck, and the backyard is ridiculously small, but I have big plans for the rumpus room that I think my 3 little girls are going to love! Stay tuned :)