Bathroom on the cheap

8th May 20171 Comment

I may have mentioned in a previous update that I planned on doing some improvements to the bathroom in order to be able to live with it for longer – as our extension will not be happening now for some time.

The old suite was all in grey paired with this awful orange-y wooden toilet seat and bath panel. In fact the original wooden toilet seat, when we moved it was so horrible we immediately threw it out. Paul replaced it on our first day in without letting me even looking at it, as he thought I might put off from going in the bathroom ever again! But even with that fixed, it was depressing to look at and with the grey floral tiles covering every wall, the room really just wasn’t cutting it. Oh, and did I mention the crusty grey carpet that was actually thinner that the vinyl we put down? With my medical condition, I actually spend more time than most in the bathroom so I have to look at it all quite a lot.

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These are the only pictures that I have of the old bathroom. They aren’t very good because, if I recall this was the day of moving in and I was busy trying to get pictures of it all and wasn’t really focusing much on quality at the time. I don’t think I would have ever expected to be publishing pictures of my toilet online (we can only go up in the world, I suppose).

Since the bath is a bit skanky and a bit small, we don’t really use it (except to wash all of the dirty paint brushes, rollers and trays). So the shower gets quite a lot of use, and unfortunately it was never sealed very well so it always left little wet patches on the nasty grey carpet. And if the shower got used a lot we even had a few water marks on the kitchen ceiling that’s underneath. Paul did try and fill in all of the gaps himself, and it helped a bit, but it didn’t really fix it. And we couldn’t do anything about the broken sides around the shower tray, so the first job we got done was fixing the shower, which I can confirm was much better than our own attempt. And now we’re safe in the knowledge that the flooring gets to dry out.

The next thing we did was to buy a replacement sink and toilet. We didn’t bother with the bath because it was expensive, and we don’t use it enough. The sink was one of the cheapest we could find and was in a clearance sale (bargain) and was actually quite nice. The toilet was probably the third cheapest option, so not too bad, but not a horrible flimsy one either. In total the sink and the toilet alone set us back about £125. The tap is a Grohe and cost about £50 including postage, I splashed out but it was worth the extra money. It makes the water all soft and bubbly and (best of all) it’s a mixer tap which means we can control the temperature and not have to scald ourselves with the hot tap.

However, before the new sink and toilet were installed, I spray painted the radiator. We could have replaced it and the new radiator would have cost around £20 but it wasn’t essential as it still works. I scrubbed it a bit with some steel wool and sprayed it all over. The radiator was a mixture of magnolia and white before I painted it, dotted with a few rust spots and flaking paint. The spray paint was from Amazon for £6. (If you look close, you can still see a few bumps and scrapes, but in general, it makes the bathroom look a lot better).

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We paid someone to install these, as although we’d be able to do it ourselves, we’d much rather a professional do it in case something goes wrong. (And also who wants to mess around with a dirty soil pipe when you don’t really know what you’re doing?)

We ordered some vinyl from Flooring Superstore, who can send out free samples. The cost of the flooring was £40 but the shipping was £14.

I didn’t choose any of these

Before the vinyl was fitted, we decided to take a look at the floor boards because we could see a few dips and gaps under the carpet. And were glad that we did; there was two that were completely loose with a very large gap between them. Paul has decided that the previous occupants that did the renovations had a ‘that’ll fuckin do’ attitude, because one of the floorboards was actually a ‘tongue-and-groove’ board, whereas the rest weren’t. So obviously it didn’t fit properly and left gaps in the floor.

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Paul took them out and we bought some wood from B&Q to replace them, and it was much better. Although a few of the boards were different thicknesses, so we had to plane them down and get rid of all of the spilt bits of plaster and, what appeared to be, old trodden in gum.

Bath before spraying

I decided at the last minute to spray the side of the bath white, in order for it match the rest of the room – as we didn’t replace it as we were trying to cut down on costs. I’m going to be honest here and fess up to doing a bit of a rubbish job. I didn’t bother to properly sand the side of the bath down, nor did I apply any primer. I just found some kitchen cabinet spray paint in B&Q and I wiped down the panelling after a very brief sanding and went for it. I used all of one can and by this point the colour was just starting to even out (downside to being lazy and not using primer) so I bought another. I paid £25 for the two cans. If I’d used primer I wouldn’t have needed a whole can of the paint but then I would’ve had to buy primer as well and it was probably around the same price, so no regrets.

The bathroom is by no means perfect, we still have a crappy bath. There are still tiles that I hate, but the rest is fine. And the vinyl is actually warmer and softer than the carpet that was removed, which proves just how awful the carpets are in this house. It also feels cleaner, although the new painted bath and nice clean vinyl shows just how faded some of the skirting is, so we need to give that a bit of a spruce and finish the last few bits.

The Great Outdoors

30th April 201724th June 20181 Comment

We’ve had a highly-concentrated flurry of work being done on the house. In the last couple of months, we’ve had more done than possibly the last year. Although this has been good for getting work done it means I haven’t had much of a chance to post an update in a while, but hopefully this will be the first of a few as I catch up.

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Firstly, we’ve had a lot of work going on in the gardens. We’ve finally had the fence in the back garden put up, so next door can’t just wander in (which their dog and children tended to do). And the wall at the back has been re-rendered on the bad parts, and since the weather has been so good recently, I even got round to pressure washing it and slapping on a few coats of paint.

Please excuse my sexy DIY clothes

We continue to prevail in our ongoing battle with the unrelenting tentacles of ivy which seem to be trying to drown every solid fixture in the garden – but the war continues.

I’ve painted the wall with Sandtex’s ‘Chalk Hill’ it’s a grey so light that’s almost white, but it’s a little less bland. It was a lighter colour than I thought it would be but I’m happy with it, and it’s certainly better than the semi-attempt at graffiti that was there.

We’re having more trouble on trying to decide what colour to paint the fence, however. I like the natural colour but am happy to paint the fence either a cream or grey or green (to match our new front door!) but Paul disagrees.

It’s not just the back garden that’s been getting all of the attention.

I’ve planted some delphiniums in place of where last year’s foxgloves were. One was completely chomped down by slugs overnight and has now been replaced by a new one I bought today (and now surrounded by slug pellets). I replaced one of the lupins that didn’t come back from last year. I’ve also put in a couple of anemones to fill two gaps beside the lupins. But the lavenders are still going strong for now.

A few months after we first moved in, Paul cut down all of the useless bushes along the long patch of soil running down the side of the house. Although it opened the area up, we didn’t do much more with it, until now. We pulled up all of the horrible stones that covered it and discovered that the previous occupants hadn’t bothered using proper ground sheets to stop weeds from coming up, but just used the bags that the stones had come in, and then filled in the gaps with reems of Sainsbury’s plastic bags (classy!).

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Once we’d removed all of that, we dug out the rotting roots, and have started to plan and even plant some new things. The whole raised area is reserved for edible plants. At the moment it’s mainly made up of a lot of herbs but we also planted a couple of rhubarb plants in February at the shaded end, having successfully grown rhubarb at our old flat.

All of this garden work means we have learnt a few things, and one thing is that the soil is a bit rubbishy. We have a heavy clay soil which makes it really hard to dig down deep but is also very stoney – although we try to pick out all of the stones we encounter it’s made even more difficult by the fact the clay soil solidifies when it’s exposed to the air for too long. We also found that the the area between the old fence we tore down last year and the wall that we can now see, was used as a dumping ground by previous occupants, meaning we found some lovely items, including motorcycle parts, lighters, bottles and bags of retro food packaging. It’s a bit like Time Team, but it over covers a couple of decades, although Paul was quite good at identifying old sweet wrappers and bottles from the 90’s.

Downloads

We’ve taken many bags full of stones, bricks, and other crap to the local recycling centre, which they charge for, so it’s been an expensive clean up. But it’s considerably clearer now and today we bought six large bags of soil conditioner and have tried to cover and mix it with our front garden soil in the hopes it will improve the quality and make planting/growing things a lot easier. Fingers crossed. We’ve also ripped out even more of the plants and bushes that were just growing around the place. Thankfully the recycling centre don’t charge for this, because we have taken car-loads of the stuff recently, and although we have started using our beehive shaped composter, it’s already full just with grass cutting.

Despite all of these changes, our garden has been a bit bird crazy recently. We always try and have bird food out anyway, but in previous years the bits we’ve put out have been ignored by the local wildlife. But when we noticed a couple of birds that kept visiting us, we bought some more and then suddenly it’s escalated to flocks of sparrows, at least a couple of blue tits and a great tit, two black birds, a fat wood pigeon, and two magpies. we’ve been having to fill the feeder up every day with suet pellets and seeds (although looking at the floors around the feeder, they don’t seem to like black sunflower seeds, so they are probably getting through it so quickly just so they can get to the bits they actually like). We’ve since purchased a water feeder as well as several other little feeding areas for them all.

Today we’ve bought a sparrow bird house and Paul’s climbed on top of the utility roof to put it in a warm but protected area. We probably won’t see anything this year, but fingers cross for the coming years.

Hygge in time for Christmas

7th February 20177th February 2017Leave a comment

It’s been a very slow six months in terms of home improvements but it feels as though time has flown by in all other aspects of our lives. Halloween and Christmas have come and gone and we’re scrabbling around in this New Year trying to organise various people to come and have a look at our house.

We seem to be having particular trouble with carpenters at the moment, none of them are all that interested in the little jobs but we don’t feel comfortable hiring anyone for the big jobs without having seen how they are first; both Paul and I are a little reluctant to pay out lots of money after having our fingers burned by Dave Owens and his company last year.

Although we technically won our claim against his company and have a CCJ against them, there’s nothing we can do to make them pay. He’s already had several companies with similar names, all trading under the same initials and logo and using all the same staff. It’s just money that we have to write off as a loss because hiring bailiffs is only going to add to the cost and I’m fairly certain, having heard many similar stories, that a conman like Dave has covered his back.

As an early Christmas present, my extremely generous parents bought us a log-burner for the house which we had fitted in the first week of December. We didn’t have a great deal of room in which to fit the stove, limiting our choices (which was helpful because it took us a long time to decide as it was). Our two favourite contenders were: The short penguin and Dartmoor 5 .

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We finally decided on Dean Forge’s Dartmoor 5, a local company’s smallest stove, and we had them install a slate hearth and an oak mantle whilst they were there, which we’re both really pleased with.

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The lighting is this image really does a great job of concealing our shitty, stripped-bare walls whilst conveying a great sense of cosiness and warmth.

In the first week we had it installed, I took an embarrassing number of pictures of it and then had to delete a few when I came to the conclusion that I had more photos of our stove than our cat. It made for a great addition before Christmas though and really boosted our house’s hygge value. We do go through the kindling awfully quickly though.

We do intend to have this plastered in the near future…

A couple of weeks ago we bought a (very expensive) fan to sit on top our our log burner, I’m going to be honest; had I known how much it was when Paul bought it, I probably would have put my foot down. I’ve still not quite recovered from the shock but I do have to admit that it does a very good job of circulating all of the hot air around the room (bloody good for that price!).

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Our next addition to the house will be more new windows and a new front door. These have been in the works since October but our window guy is a very busy man and we also had trouble agreeing on the front door (don’t worry, I mostly got my own way but Paul is still a bit sore on the subject and has taken the ‘do whatever you want’ huffy attitude). We’ve (I’ve) gone for a green door after much deliberating.

Final decision was the far right green door

I’m excited for the door to be put in as ours has a bad habit of just slowly opening by itself until we come to investigate why there is such a draught in the house. We’ve also gone for a composite door as we also argued about whether to go for wood or UPVC (who’d have thought we’d both have such strong opinions on doors?) and decided that composite was the best of both. We agreed on the glass design because we both didn’t really like any of the options.

The windows being fitted in the living room are the most important as they let in the most sound/draught, and there were obviously some issues before we moved in because there is some sort of fungal growth under the rotting window sills that we’re eager to get rid of.

Today we have manged to book in for some more jobs and quotes with a firm we’ve been using for a lot of small jobs. We’ve had to tell them we won’t pay their invoice unless they book us in for the next job because it takes such a long time for them to get in touch with us/ sometimes they don’t get in touch at all and we have to chase them. This is a common problem, and not just for this particular firm, from what we’ve experienced and we just cant understand how/why they haven’t got anyone to manage this side of things more closely. They are even slow to send us invoices!

The first of these jobs will be on Thursday when our garden fence will be replace and then in three weeks time we’ll be having yet more work done.

One of the jobs we’ll be having done in March is a small bathroom makeover. I’ll probably do a whole post on this because we’re going to be doing it up cheaply just until we have the extension, because the extension will be taking a lot longer than originally planned and we both feel like we can’t keep living with a bathroom that depressing.