My boyfriend and I are buying our first home together. We both currently live with parents and have never lived together, so this is a huge and very exciting step! We’re due to move in by October, so we don’t have long to go!

However, problems have now started to arise when playing around with ideas to decorate and furnish the house. The house is pretty outdated as it stands and needs modernising and painting before we move in. The problem is, we both have COMPLETELY different ideas of how we want to decorate and furnish our home.

I’m really into the modern, chic look; gray walls, laminate floors, leather sofa, glass dining table and minimal furniture to avoid clutter. He hates my ideas, and thinks that the furnitureI like is ‘tacky and cheap looking’. On the other hand he wants to go for a more old fashioned and kind of wacky style with yellow paint, geometric wallpaper upstairs, oval wooden dining table, big wooden wall units (which we don’t really have space for), carpet flooring... Completely opposite styles as you can see. I’m willing to compromise in some areas like the flooring for example, but some of his furnishing ideas are quite bold, eccentric and quite frankly outdated; my worst nightmare to be honest.

To add fuel to the fire, my mum has very kindly offered to buy us some furniture to get us started as finances will be very tight after we pay our deposit. She has told me to stand my ground on furniture I like as she’s going to be the one footing the bill and wants me to be 100% happy with what she buys for the home. She’s said she’s not prepared to pay for furniture that I don’t like and won’t be happy with just to please him, which I totally understand, but he needs to be happy too as it’s a joint home.

We have to compromise, of course. But how do we do that when our styles are polar opposite? It’s horrible that something which should be so exciting is being ruined by two very different tastes. Any advice on what to do???