Five years ago my husband and I decided to buy a house and officially make Dubai home.  We looked at a bunch of villas but found that we would have to do a lot of work to the traditional style homes to bring them in line with our more modern taste. We were a little wary of buying “off plan” but eventually found the perfect floor plan in what was a rare modern-looking luxury development at the time and decided to take the leap.  We fell for the luxury branding but decided that even with some unexpected updates upon handover it would still cost us less than having to completely renovate an older home.

Fast forward five years.  We couldn’t have been more wrong about the off-plan risk. Our new home was years late, delivered with shockingly low quality finishes and we have spent a year and a half tearing our brand new home apart and rebuilding it piece by piece along with a new pool garden in place of the sandpit (another long story all on its own). As most of the issues were unexpected, we lived in the house with our two small toddlers and what felt like one hundred contractors for most of the transition.

This is one of the big reasons I’ve been away from the site for so long but, in hindsight, that is probably a good thing. My vocabulary of swear words has grown extensively over the same period of time and while I have enough incredulous stories to write a book, airing my frustrations as they happened probably wouldn’t have been a good idea.

Now that our house is almost finished, I can finally look around in peace instead of frustration and would like to start sharing some of our unexpected house renovation adventure with you.  I’m proud of the design decisions we made for our family and hope that you like the results of our unexpected adventure as much as we do. Stay tuned for an interesting transformation.