A Big Autumn Reset 🍂 🧺 | Preparing Our Home for Cosy Season

There's always a point at the end of summer when I suddenly become very aware of all the little jobs I've been putting off because I've just been enjoying the sunshine and being outside a little too much. The things I've walked past for weeks thinking I must get around to that eventually. Not now though, I need to go outside. Things like a scuffed wall, a cupboard that needs sorting, a room that could do with a really good clean. And somehow as soon as September arrives I feel this urge to get everything in order. I think it is that classic back to school feeling that a lot of us feel during this time of year. It really gives me a little bit of a kickstart and makes me just want to get those little finickity jobs done and ticked off of the never ending list that one has with your own home. So we are officially into meteorological autumn now. Although it still feels as though summer is lingering on for just a bit longer, I don't know if I'm quite ready to let go of it yet. But the evenings are slowly drawing in, the mornings feel a lot cooler and there's a definite change in the air. So before the weather really turns I wanted to spend a few days giving the house a proper reset. This did happen, as I said, over the course of a few days. There's no way that it's achievable to do all of this in one day. Well maybe you could but I wanted to take a softer and a slower approach to this. I'm not changing everything over for autumn just yet but I want to get things clean, organised and ready for the next few months. And I started in my little office and study space. This room gets used a lot so over time the walls have picked up quite a few marks and scuffs. Nothing dramatic or that bad but it was enough that every time I sat down I would notice them and it niggled me. So I dug out some leftover paint from the loft and spent a little time touching everything up. It's one of those tiny jobs that really doesn't take that much time in the grand scheme of things, especially once you get going, which made me wonder why I'd been ignoring it for so long. While I was there I decided to give the whole room a proper deep clean. I cleared everything from my dressing table, gave it a good polish and then did the same with the shelves over here as well. Took everything off and gave it a really good clean. I did the same with my old bureau which is actually where I do most of my work. I love this piece of furniture, I just feel so whimsical whenever I work at it. I really, really do enjoy working here so there was something really satisfying about giving this a good polish and bringing a bit of shine and gloss back to life on the furniture. And by the time I'd finished I felt like the whole room felt a lot calmer. I always notice such a difference when the spaces around me are clean and clear, it just makes me feel as though my brain has a bit more room as well. Next I moved into the guest bedroom. I stripped the bed and changed the duvet covers just to give it a bit of a refresh in here for whoever is going to end up staying in here next. I also, during this time of year, I like to wash a lot of the soft furnishings that you wouldn't kind of wash on a regular basis, so things like your scatter cushion covers, your throws, maybe your rugs. I like to wash them now so that they can still have time to dry outside in the sunshine before it gets too wet and dreary and everything has to be tumble dried or dried inside. I also gave the windowsill a bit of a restyle, nothing major, just moving a few things around and making the room feel a little bit more refreshed and to give it a bit of a new zest of life. I think there's something really comforting about having spare rooms ready for guests even when not necessarily somebody is scheduled to come and stay. It just makes the whole house feel cosy and looked after. Downstairs there were a few more jobs I wanted to tackle while we still have this lovely dry weather. As I said before, I like to wash a lot of the soft furnishings around this time of year before it gets too cold, so I was putting back on the cushion covers off of our sofa in our kind of open plan kitchen diner just to give it a bit of a refresh. And then this sofa is very well loved, the pets spend a lot of time here, so I gave that a good hoover and a good old clean. This coffee machine was kindly gifted to me by Am Chef who sent me their coffee machine to try and it has been such a lovely addition to these slow mornings at home. It has a built in precision grinder with 20 different settings so you can adjust it depending on the beans you're using and how strong and flavoursome you like your coffee. I also really liked the steam wand because I like having quite a milky coffee personally. It feels very fitting for this time of year when I'm definitely starting to try and look forward to having slower mornings, having coffees at home and just taking my time, having five minutes to myself to have, you know, a little bit of cake, a bit of a treat and a lovely coffee. If you'd like to have a look, I'll pop the link below in the description and you can use my code NATURALLIVING, all capital letters, for 25% off. So we have just arrived at TK Maxx HomeSense, I've got a couple of things that I wanted to pick up for the house, so we're going to go have a look now and see, see what's new, see what's going on in there. Unfortunately, I have just realised, I think it is the weekend before the kids go back to school, so it is, it is carnage on the roads, it is so busy, there are so many people out and normally I don't like coming to these shops during the weekends because they just get so busy and I get a bit overwhelmed. So we're going to see how it goes, if, yeah, I hope it's not a fail because I do have a few things that I really, really need to pick up, so fingers crossed it won't be too bad and we can find some lovely bits and bobs. Let's just crack on, pray for me, let's get going. So I like shopping in places like TK Maxx and HomeSense because you can find these really cool brands that you wouldn't necessarily find in sort of mainstream shops I suppose. I like getting products that are as natural as possible and use minimal ingredients and I try to keep plastic to a minimum where I can and I do find that I can find these sort of toiletries much more accessibly in TK Maxx and HomeSense. Of course you have to have a little bit of a rummage but I would absolutely recommend having a little peek in their toiletry section because I do think it's quite underrated there. There was a bit of an end of summer sale going on as well, so there were quite a few goodies there that I was very, very tempted by, particularly this bedspread. I thought it was really, really beautiful and I did like the artwork there as well, there were quite a few bits and bobs I was really tempted by but I was being good. I had my shopping list and I absolutely wanted to stick to it but you can start to see the warmer colours, the faux furs, the wools, the knits starting to come through now and I just think everybody is kind of coming round to the fact that it is soon going to be autumn. Okay you know what, that was actually really successful, there were quite a few bits in TK Maxx that I needed. I also popped to our home bargains because the one local, well kind of local, to me has a garden centre so I've got a couple of plants because the flower boxes at the front of our house have just been absolutely annihilated by the heat. So now that the kind of new autumnal, more winter hardy plants have come out, I'm going to replant them basically so that will look nice because at the moment they just look, well they're dead, they look awful so they're not thriving at all. I just wanted to get these bits ready for the house before autumn because you know when you just leave things for ages and then the kind of shopping list starts to pile up and you're like okay I actually just need to go out purposefully just to buy these things because it's annoying me not having them because you need them, well need them, do you really need them? That's beside the point, I'm not getting into that now. I've got a little takeaway coffee, I'm listening to a podcast, I'm listening to The Rest is History. If any of you listen to that podcast please let me know, I absolutely love it, it's just like a comfort podcast. I'm listening to the episode about Elizabeth I and kind of like the Catholic rebellion and all that sort of thing, so so interesting. In the bathroom I was decanting a few of the bits that I picked up from our little shopping trip the other day. I like to keep things quite minimal in the bathroom, I don't like having loads of clutter out, it just, it overstimulates my brain I think, so I like to decanter things and get things set out. So I'm popping this bubble bath into this amber glass jar that we had left over from aloe vera juice very specifically, but I'm decanting that out and then I'm also going to decant the bath salts into this jar just so they're nice and accessible and I can leave them by the side of the bath to use whenever I need to. These slower repetitive jobs are often my favourite ones, they don't really require much but they give you that lovely feeling that everything is being popped back into their rightful place. Next up I gave the living room a good clean, I took everything off of the mantelpiece and gave it a good dust and I also fancied a bit of a refresh and a rearrange. I am going to be doing a bit of an autumnal decorate with me soon but until then I thought I'd just give the space a bit of a refresh. I bought this basket from TK Maxx and I thought it would be perfect to store all of these cosy wintry blankets in for the upcoming seasons. So I rolled up a few of our favourite throws and tucked them up inside the basket. I have actually been doing this for years but I have never gotten around to doing it in this house and I just love how welcoming and cosy it feels just being able to grab a blanket out of the basket and cosy up with it on the sofa. It's a very small thing but this is one of my favourite things about preparing the house for autumn. It isn't about decorating and adding loads and loads of pumpkins I guess, it's just about making the house feel warm and comfortable and adding in those textures that I spoke about, the faux fur and the wool and the knits. It just helps to make things feel a lot cosier I think. After all of that cleaning I finally came back to my little dressing table project that you would have seen me start at the beginning of this video. The handles I had taken off earlier were perfectly fine, there was nothing wrong with them at all but I wanted to add a bit of colour to the room. I thought that the black finish really suited our old house but I think the colours are a bit different in this house so I wanted to give them a bit of a facelift. So I just used good old Rub and Buff to basically dab on the brass coloured effect paint onto the handles and I'm really pleasantly surprised with how well they turned out. I think they look really good and they do look very sort of rustic and aged which was absolutely the look I was going for. And the final job of our autumnal reset was outside. Although the garden, as you can see, is very very green again because we have been having some more rain and our lawn has absolutely sprung back to life. I love all of the clover in there, it looks so lovely. But I picked up some soft pink autumn flowers, I think these were chrysanthemums and cyclamens and I've planted them into the window boxes that will sit at the front of our house. I feel like it's a lovely way to just welcome in a new season. I do like to change these flowers up seasonally and any that do survive just get moved into the beds of the garden and I think it's just a nice way to keep the colours rotating and the front of the house looking nice. I always find this time of year a little bit bittersweet. Summer has been so beautiful, especially this year, it's been very glorious and I don't feel completely ready to say goodbye to it yet. I'm still enjoying the warm afternoons, the flowers, eating outside when we can, but I also know that one of the nicest things about living seasonally is allowing things to change. I hope you enjoyed this video, please don't forget to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel if you did. I hope you have a lovely rest of your day, stay happy and blessed be.