Last year, my little family (me, husband, toddler and cat) moved from the leafy outer suburbs of Melbourne back to the inner city. It had been a long time coming, and we knew our lifestyle and new home were going to be quite different. We didn’t expect to be renovating in less than a year after we we moved, but we got the itch, and here we are! We’re starting with a full remodel of the kitchen and downstairs living area.
This is a bit of a departure from the usual Glow Diaries recipes, but a few of you have asked about it, so I thought I’d tell the whole story from the start.
Why we moved
When my husband Steve and I first met at university, we were both living in sharehouses in the inner north of Melbourne. When we moved out into our first rental, we stayed in the same area – we loved being right on the doorstep of the city, with coffee shops, cinemas, great food (the usual city living perks) and having an easy commute. When we eventually bought our first home in 2021, we fell in love with a house that was MUCH further out of the city than we had ever expected to live (about 25km away) but it was leafy and peaceful, so we thought we’d give it a go.
It was a beautiful home, and had been freshly renovated before we moved in. I fell in love with it’s light, airy feel as soon as I stepped inside and completely forgot about the location haha.
If you follow me on social media you will probably recognise the old house from the white, grey and oak kitchen ^
It worked well for a few years but after we had our son, Ollie, I was really craving being closer to friends and family, who were mostly back in the inner city.
I spent over a year trying to convince myself to stay. It was practical, it was frugal, it made sense, and we had amazing childcare… but sometimes, no matter how nice a place is, if your people aren’t there it just doesn’t feel like home. So last year in May, we found a new house and moved back to our old stomping ground.
Why we chose not to renovate
Here’s the part that makes people laugh now. We’re toddler parents, thoroughly in our convenience era, and we actively chose NOT to buy a property that needed major renovations. Even though there’s more financial upside in a proper fixer-upper, after years of feeling isolated in the suburbs and raising a little person, we (mostly me) just didn’t have the mental fortitude to take on a big project. Especially in a domain I know literally nothing about, my dad once showed me how to drill some hooks into a door, and that was the extent of my DIY experience when we bought this place ha.
So we bought a townhouse we could move straight into, told ourselves the dated kitchen and bathrooms were fine, and did a few small things first like new blinds and curtains, better wardorbe shelving, tile stickers over the dated bathroom tiles (they don’t look as cheap as you’d think lol)
But the itch wouldn’t leave me alone
Even in a move-in-ready home, there were a surprising number of little friction points I felt a weirdly urgent need to fix. I’d told myself I didn’t care about the dated kitchen, but nesting and making this house my own turned into an intense itch I had to scratch. It didn’t help that in our new place, the ground floor is a smaller, slightly awkward shape and it has three storeys (our old place was single level).
No matter how many times I rearranged the furniture I just could NOT get the living-dining room situation to flow or “make sense”. With a lot of help from my interior designers, aka YouTube and ChatGPT lol, I worked out that with a slightly smaller kitchen, we could make the entire layout work a lot better (and also… that a new kitchen would look much nicer)
More than almost anything in life, I’ve always wanted a beautiful home. I don’t know why. I think I am probably not alone in that dream. Plus, I’d already felt what that could be like from our last place, and I wanted that in our new location too.
So we decided to do it
The tipping point came early this year. I’d been over to the States to celebrate the US launch of my cookbook, Cozy Vegan, and to attend a conference, and I came home with a bit of new-year energy. By then we’d properly fallen for the area.
We’d met so many of our neighbours with kids, who all play in the street together – it’s a really amazing community. So we decided to just throw caution to the wind and do it.
Which brings us to now
So here we are. The project plan is 5 weeks, but realistically we’ve been told to expect 7 weeks all up, so we should be done by late September 2026.
This is the kitchen that is about to come out ↓
We’ll be living in the house most of the way through, with occasional respite trips to my parents farm (a three hour drive away).
For the rest of it, we’ll be cooking out of an air fryer, microwave and a kettle ha. I’ll be taking you along for all of it.
We’ve batch-cooked a heap of food using Souper Cubes containers… they are AMAZING for meal prep.
There’s something so satisfying about turning food into little one or two serve bricks – even in total chaos makes life feel so neat and organised! These recipes are my Black Bean & Jackfruit Tacos and the Butter Chickpeas from Cozy Vegan.
If you want to check out the post-demolition mess stay tuned for the next post – I’ll share it on email and Instagram 🙂
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