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