Barely an update

24th June 201624th June 2018Leave a comment

Early this morning it was announced that we were no longer to remain a part of the EU. I am both shocked and disappointed in this result as we don’t know how it’s going to affect us in the long run, both with the house and it’s mortgage and with everything else really. I know a lot of other people are in the same scenario as us, but we’re just going to have to carry on for now and try and prepare for whatever may come.

Anyway, back to the usual stuff I blog about:

There are no major changes around the house since my last update. We did pull down half of the fence at the back of our garden, which took longer than expected seeing as there are three layers of it. There’s some fence, then some more bits of fence then a big layer of chipboard. And that doesn’t include the sheer bulk of ivy and other plants growing up, around and through it, which make it even more difficult to pull apart. The wall behind is thankfully solid, but it will need some rendering. But that can only happen when we’ve pulled the rest down, remove the concrete posts and fill in the ditch!

My new plants have been looking good. I bought two foxgloves and two lupins earlier this year when B&Q were having a sale. To be honest I didn’t expect them to look that good. I’m actually pretty rubbish at keeping plants alive so the fact they’ve even flowered has surprised me.

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Only one lupin flowered because the other one was ravaged by slugs, but it’s hanging onto life by a few little leaves. This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago and this particular flower is now made up of seed pods, but he pink and white one beside it is still in its prime.

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This was how it looked a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to get a lot more pictures but I had poorly eyes and wasn’t able to do it myself.

B&Q lied to me about my foxgloves. I chose a white one and a purple-y coloured one, because I was aiming for lots of purples and whites in the front garden but I probably won’t do that now as both turned out pink. I don’t really like pink that much, I don’t hate the flowers, I’m just a bit disappointed. Maybe I’ll just try and make everything really colourful instead. I have lots of wildflower seeds I have yet to plant.

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One of my foxgloves fell over a couple of days ago. I don’t know why. Maybe it was a bit windy.

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When I walk/ cycle to work, I have to go past this beautiful white foxglove. It makes me jealous because it always looks so perfect. Though it’s all closed up again now and my flowers are still going.

We’ve had a quote come through from a building company for some works to the house. It was a bit of a shock though. So we want to source some of our own materials, because I can get discounts, so we have discussed that with them and they’ve said it was fine. So fingers crossed for getting more work done.

The main two jobs were the fireplaces. We’re planning on having a log burner downstairs in the living room and a small decorative fireplace in the bedroom upstairs. We went down to Plymouth last weekend for Fathers day (which we had to celebrate on Saturday) and Paul and I visited a nice little reclamation shop that had a real treasure trove of old items in there, including loads of cast iron fireplaces. We bought a second hand, replica Victorian fireplace for £175 which was a lot cheaper than the ones we’d been looking at on eBay and online. So this one is for the bedroom.

bedroomfire

For the living room fireplace, what we are going to try and do is get it all sorted apart from the actual log burner (which is the expensive part). We want to leave that until later so we can spread the cost a bit.

As for the other building company (the one who offered us a refund)? They haven’t refunded us yet and it doesn’t look as though they intend to. After many warnings, we are now taking them to small claims court. I’m fairly confident in taking this route, especially as the company have even previously admitted in earlier emails that they owe us money but have never paid it to us. My mum and the solicitors she works for have been a great help during this process. So fingers crossed that it all gets sorted nice and quickly and we can move on from the whole sordid thing.

The Master Bedroom

6th May 2016Leave a comment

It’s been a few weeks since my last post.

When the room was still mostly empty

My lovely new desk, a present from my parents, has arrived from France and looks great in the study and we’ve moved everything back in there. The study looked really great for about two weeks but as we’re now starting on the next room it now has a few extra bits crammed in that don’t really belong there. Nevermind, hopefully it won’t be for long.

The next room we’re working on is the master bedroom. Like the majority of the house; it’s covered in wood-chip wallpaper.

Unfortunately this picture doesn’t show the lovely boarder we had, as I’d pulled it all of before remembering we needed pictures.

Day of house purchase, 11 May 2015: After scrubbing our old flat until spotless, we then had to scrub our new house into the early hours of the morning.

We invested in a steamer as when decorating the study we used my Aunt and Uncle’s and they needed it back for their new property.

Wagner steamer and Hop-up work bench

I bought this Wagner steamer off Amazon: it had the best reviews and is reasonably priced. I was a little concerned because two of the 322 reviews actually said that it caught fire but I’m putting that down to user error. It did exactly what I would expect a steamer to do, however it only comes with one steam plate – whereas the one we borrowed had a couple which meant we could switch to a smaller one for tricky areas. It’s not the end of the world, a smaller size would have been nice though. We’ve actually found that you can get a additional small Steam Plate for this steamer for under £5, so we’d recommend that too, because using the Dif Wallpaper remover was a lot more difficult, although it did eventually work.

We got our scrapers ready, dug out our Paper Tiger and readied our masks and got started. Thankfully, even though the room is a lot larger than the study, it was a lot easier to pull off the paper; I managed to pull off a lot of it without the steamer. The top quarter of the wall however was a bit of a bugger, we aren’t entirely sure why but it seemed to be where there was once a dado rail.

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Paul also managed to pull out the built in wardrobe with a lot of effort (see top picture with hammer). We’re planning to have floating shelves in the alcove with a cupboard below to store a few things. It took us a while but we’ve finally found a carpenter who has time to actually do it for us.

Whilst stripping the wallpaper we may have stumbled upon a possible exciting discovery. It’s early days but it looks as though there may have been a fireplace. On the chimney breast, once I’d stripped it down, there was a large amount of filler/ different plaster than on the rest of the walls. We would love to restore this feature if possible so are going to get a second opinion before doing anything rash (like starting to chisel it out *ahem* 😛 )

This week we have a carpenter working on the loft hatch for us then once a plasterer comes in, he’ll start on the woodwork in the bedroom then hopefully the banisters for the stairs.

We’re going away to Northern Ireland the week after next but as soon as we’re back the Architect will be coming over to take some detailed measurements. We’ve been having a spot of bother with our building company recently and there has been almost a complete breakdown in communication. It looks as though it’s being sorted out now though and the owner is now managing our project for the meantime. Fingers crossed, things may start speed up now.

The Study

29th March 201629th March 20162 Comments

Our study has been our first big project in our new home, it’s been slow going though; we’ve currently been in our house for more than 10 months and it seems as though hardly anything has changed.

From the wallpaper to the plumbing, many things have gone wrong and we’ve had to deviate from our original plans. Although it’s still not 100% complete, it’s enough for us to move onto the next room. All that’s left is the fitting of the blinds and the replacing of some old furniture, but these jobs will have to wait until our bank accounts recover from the constant blows that home improvement inflicts on them.

We started moving some furniture back into the room on Friday (after the new carpet was fitted on Wednesday) and most excitingly (to me) is that I have moved in my brand new stool from Mason Du Monde, and finally taken off its protective cover.

Of course I didn’t get the wallpaper I wanted, but we improvised and it looks good. I originally purchased two rolls of Cole & Son’s Columbus wallpaper – which is the same as the Melville wallpaper but just without the sea creatures.

Columbus by Cole and Son

It was a paper that Paul and I actually agreed on (the only one). I bought the rolls from John Lewis, where I’d ordered some wallpaper samples, however, after paying for the two rolls I was contacted and told they wouldn’t be able to get them for me until the end of March. I cancelled my order and phoned around lots of wallpaper companies and they all had to order them from Cole and Son (who didn’t have any) rather than actually stocking it themselves. I didn’t want to wait that long, so we opted to paint instead because we couldn’t agree on any other paper.

I’d heard some good things about Valspar paint and opted to try it out. But also because we didn’t realise that B&Q had stopped selling Crown and Dulux paint when we went to get some. We originally opted for two colours: Aged Parchment and Urban Haze, intending to have three walls in the darker Aged Parchment and the outside wall in Urban Haze but in the middle of painting we changed our minds and kept the outside wall white instead.

After a very long, tiring day of watching Paul and I move furniture around, Charlie (the cat) had to have a lay down to recoup his energy.

Here are a couple of before and after photos, very much hoping you can guess which is which.

It’s a relief to be rid of those wretched stencilled teddy bears.

Paul made the wonky doors sound like they were utterly and very noticeably crooked, but when he hung them to show me they were actually fine. Yes, they weren’t perfect but we’re hoping – in the far future- to turn this cupboard into the entrance of a staircase leading to the attic (so it’s not the end of the world).

The room is still rather bare at the moment but it won’t be long until we put up the pictures and shelving and fill it with all of our things.

For my upcoming birthday, my parents have very generously bought me an expensive desk from Mason Du Monde, which was ordered today. It will be a few weeks before it arrives but I’m over the moon and thoroughly excited. Will have more pictures when it arrives.

Number 85

Category: The Home

Barely an update

The Master Bedroom

The Study