After nearly a year of ups and let downs we have finally exchanged contracts on a house we love and will be moving in, in August.

As though house is way over what we intended to spend, we don´t have a lot of money for doing a great deal to it immediately, other than a paint through.

Much as I love the house, I´m struggling to get a colour scheme in mind. At the moment our furniture is light oak, with cream sofas. The accent colour in the room is cerise. We have a large picture which is an abstract mainly in cerise and turquoise and we have some lovely inherited cerise glassware which I like to have out on display, so I would like to work with this if possible.

My big problem is that the kitchen which is open plan from the lounge has a bright red silestone worktop and plinth! It really doesn´t go with cerise.

It would cost about €2000 to change the worktop. We would like to change the whole kitchen to a more modern design when we can afford it, so I´m not sure it would be worth spending so much at the moment for something that would be ripped out in a few years.

Any ideas on how to make the colour scheme work?