Share Your Space: Inside a content creator’s newly renovated first home.

Mamamia's Share Your Space series asks everyday women to share all the juicy, specific details about their homes. How much do you pay in rent? Who do you live with? Where did you get your furniture? It's pulling back the curtain on real estate in Australia, and allowing us to really see how the people around us live.

This week, we take a peek inside content creator Brooke Hearne’s stylish home.

Job:

I’m a content creator. I share photos of my home online and I inspire other people to do things to their homes.

I live with:

I live with my husband and four kids, 10-year-old Caiden, six-year-old Lexy, four-year-old Havana, and our youngest Ivy, who is five-months-old.

Mortgage: 

This is our first home. We moved here in 2021.

Location: 

We live in Western Sydney.

Lifestyle: 

Since having Ivy, we’ve pretty much just been hanging out at home and getting used to being parents of four kids. We’re homebodies. We love having movie nights and spending time renovating our home.

So, take us inside.

Kitchen and Dining Room: It was very dark and gloomy in the kitchen when we first moved into the home. Everything was dark grey. The cupboards, the floors, everything. It just felt very closed off and uninviting.

When moving into the house, we really wanted to make the space feel a little bit bigger – so going light and bright was my aim.

We managed to renovate the kitchen at a really affordable price by doing most of it ourselves. Rather than replacing the whole cupboards, for example, we just replaced the grey cupboard doors with white doors.

We also painted the kitchen, added more lighting, and switched to lighter flooring.

The kitchen, dining room and living room are an open living space, so going light and bright has really opened up the space and changed the look and feel entirely.

We recently gave the dining room a fresh coat of paint with Dulux UltraAir. It’s an ultra low odour paint, so you can move back into the space within three hours. We were really surprised at how little the paint smelled. 

Because the dining room is in an open plan space, it’s an area that we can’t really keep our five-month-old Ivy away from. But with Dulux UltraAir, we were able to keep Ivy nearby in the living room while we painted. I didn’t have to worry about the smell being too strong for her or anything like that. We even had dinner in the dining room later that night. It was great.

Image: Supplied. 

Bedrooms: Our master bedroom is a really calming space. We really wanted to make this room a parent’s retreat.

It’s a slightly smaller bedroom than we’ve had in previous rentals, so we added panelling to make the space feel bigger. 

We also decided to go with no bed head in this room. Instead, we’ve just got a basic bed frame pushed up against the feature wall. It has made that feature wall more of the focus rather than taking away from it. 

Image: Supplied. 

My two girls, Lexy and Havana, share a bedroom. They’ve got yellow and pink bedding, and we’ve added a lilac feature wall to the room. The bedroom is quite different from the rest of the house, but it was important for us to capture their personalities in the room and make it a bit more fun.

Image: Supplied. 

Our son Caiden is a bit older, so he’s had more input into his room. As his bedroom was quite small and Caiden wanted a double bed, we built a half wall in there. It’s been a good space saver because it means we didn’t have to use a chunky bed head in the room. Plus, it creates shelving.

Bathrooms: We have two bathrooms – the main bathroom and our ensuite. The ensuite is the only room in the house that we haven’t renovated yet. We have painted it white, so it doesn’t look completely out of place with the rest of the house, but it still needs some work.

We did a budget friendly makeover on the main bathroom because that’s the bathroom that the kids and guests use.

Image: Supplied. 

Nursery: This is my first nursery. When we were renting, the houses that we lived in were all quite small, so we had the kids in our room with us. 

I wanted the nursery to be very minimal. Being a fourth time mum, I know that there’s things that you don’t necessarily need. 

It’s a very calm and relaxing space. I go in there and I don’t feel overwhelmed by all the things. 

Image: Supplied. 

Laundry: The laundry was the very first room that we renovated when we moved in. We had no DIY experience, so it’s probably the most rewarding renovation out of all of them. My husband doesn’t have any trade experience or anything like that, but he absolutely nailed it.

Being the first room that we renovated, the laundry set the tone for the rest of the house. We used VJ panelling in the laundry, and we ended up loving it so much that we continued that throughout the whole home. 

With the benchtop in the laundry, we used this beautiful Tasmanian oak and we’ve ended up using it in so many different areas of the home for shelving. We also used some of the same tiles in the kitchen and the main bathroom.

Image: Supplied. 

Yard: Our favourite part of the yard is our deck. We put in composite decking, which runs from the back door to the fence. It’s a six by four metre section, so we can put a blow up pool on it and we have a lounge setting out there.

By putting in the deck, we’ve been able to make the backyard feel like more of an extension of the house. We’ve also found that the kids will actually go out there and use the cubby and play outside more now that it feels complete. 

Image: Supplied. 

Final thoughts.

As long as you're willing to learn, you'll be surprised at what you can do on a budget. We knew nothing when we started, and we’ve turned this home into something that we’re really proud of without breaking the bank.

Smells like home sooner, Dulux UltraAir get’s you back in your space in 3 hours with ultra low emissions and odour technology.

Feature Image: Supplied/@thehstyled.