Master Bedroom - fitted wardrobe demolition

So, it's a year since I was stripping the wallpaper in the master bedroom... and not much has happened in there since!  We mostly use the room for drying laundry and generally storing stuff...

The master bedroom had fitted wardrobes that were 1980s-tastic... melamine doors :)  Here is a still from my first house video, with Ian demonstrating the mirrored door ;)

And here's how it's been looking for months...

On Sunday night we decided to start taking the wardrobe apart... it was an absolute bugger to get the doors off!  In the end we had to saw some of the plastic fixings...

Another sneaky glimpse at the original pink paint that decorated the room.. and two different textured wallpapers.

Ceiling paint colours

Doors are off! This is the back of the mirrored door, the backing has decayed in an interesting pattern!

Doors off and starting to remove the shelves... 

Bowed shelves:

Everything down!

35 years of dust...

Ready for disposal!

Finished!  Now I just need to strip the wallpaper from the alcove...

Paint samples.  The chosen one is top left, with the fabric sample hanging on it (which will be the curtains)

And in other news, we've ordered our kitchen units!  Just need to order the worktop now.  Kitchen will be fitted in late May.  Here's samples of the kitchen cabinet doors (gloss white), worktop (light grey), flooring (dark grey), and potential wall colour:

Also, Ian says my collection of paint swatches is getting ridiculous...

And finally, our new bathroom should be fitted last week in March/first week in April!

Back to stripping

Sometimes working on the house feels like being at work - it's all project management!  At the moment everything is made up of webs of dependencies - for example, we can't work on the master bedroom until we've done the bathroom, because we're moving a wall between the two.

Similarly, we're on the verge of getting on and replacing the kitchen, and part of this will involve new flooring, which will also run through the hallway.  That's great, but I don't want to be painting the skirting boards in the hallway once the new floor is down, so I need to paint the skirting boards first.  Except the line between wallpaper and skirting board is somewhat blurred thanks to years of overlapping paint - so if I paint the skirting boards now, and strip the woodchip later, it's more than likely that I'll peel the new paint (plus layers of old paint) off the skirting board.

And so, that is why I am currently stripping the woodchip from the hallway, despite never anticipating this being a priority!

I've been back stripping (!) for a few days, and have now removed everything from downstairs up to the first step on the stairs, which is all I really need to do to enable me to paint the skirting boards.  There's still a patch behind the radiator, which I'll do when it warms up a bit and I don't mind turning the heating off!

Some photos:

Woodchip!

Most of the hallway stripped back to the yellow paint:

In progress:

Chaos:

Ridiculous relocated light switch... think we'll just move this back...

Catastrophic mess on the corners by the stairs.  Not even sure what's going on here, it seems to be some sort of double strip of plasterboard used as edging instead of corner tape or metal corner strip... the heat and moisture from the steamer has...er... wrecked it.  

We were umming and ahhing about whether the hall, stairs and landing would need skimming, but I think they will... the walls are quite a mess from the woodchip, so we'll just have to suck it up.

First, though, I need to employ someone to strip the wallpaper where it's out of my reach...!

House video tour: December 2014

11 months today since we moved in...

Number 5 in 2014

One of my favourite interior design blogs, Chris Loves Julia, recently posted a roundup of all the projects they'd tackled in 2014, and I thought it might be nice for me to do the same.  Particularly as things around here have stalled on the DIY/renovation front since finishing the living room in September, so I'm feeling a bit underachieving lately.  I need to do a new house tour video since these photos all look very out of date now!

Since we moved in January, the entire year has been a whirlwind of improvements and plans and spending money :D

We started the year by stripping lots of wallpaper:

In February we bought light fittings and curtains, and had various bits of electrical work done:

In early March we had new windows and doors:

 ...and continued the month with lots of gardening:

At the end of March Graham started work on the heating system:

...Which carried on into April:

April also featured lots of hard work from my in-laws:

We spent much of May doing more gardening and preparing for plastering work:

In June we had the first load of plastering done - lots of ceilings skimmed etc - and started on Bedroom 4 (the study), the downstairs loo, and Bedroom 3 (the spare bedroom):

In July we finished the study (which is looking a lot more lived in now!):

...and the guest bedroom, just in time for our first overnight guest:

....and the downstairs loo!

In August we had a tree cut down and that appears to be all we did, probably as we were exhausted after the three rooms of the previous month!

In September we finished the living room, bought a piano...

...and bought new sofas and made cushions!

In October we caught the last of the warmth and sun and dismantled the sunroom with the help of the wonderful Sophie and Patrick:

In November I got restless with the lack of decorating and DIY, and painted the inside of a cupboard:

And finally, December has been full of making plans for 2015 and getting ready for our first Christmas season in our lovely home :D

In 2015 we plan to:

Get a new kitchen
Finish the master bedroom
Get a new bathroom
Have the garden re-designed and overhauled
Bedroom 2 - everything needs doing in here!
New flooring in hallway

....I think that should be enough to be getting on with!

Garden 9 November 2014

The garden looked beautiful this morning:

Painting the Harry Potter cupboard

We have a cupboard under our stairs, which is a pretty normal thing to have in a house, but ours is huge!  It runs alongside the staircase then turns back round on itself and underneath the staircase itself, and many of my friends have commented on it being a Harry Potter cupboard :)

Anyway, we keep coats, vacuum cleaner etc in there but lately it's been bothering me because it smells really musty and every time I get a coat out to put on I can smell it :( the whole house smelt the same when we moved in but over time with new carpets, new paint, and general day to day life and fresh air, most of the mustiness has faded.  Obviously as we always have the cupboard door shut, air can't circulate and that's why it's retained the smell.

We didn't want to take the carpet up (yet - will do when we have new flooring in the hallway, and will get the new flooring in the cupboard as well) so I decided to paint the walls and ceiling as I believe wallpaper holds smells quite a lot.

(Also it's been a while since I painted anything and to be honest I was getting painting withdrawal symptoms!)

New white coat on the right, with the two existing shades of paint:

It's not quite that patchy really, it's just still wet in this photo and this was only after the first coat!  Scuse the fuzzy blob in the middle of the pic, my camera has some dust INSIDE the lens :(

And then I gave this stuff a go... the hallway does now smell of orange sherbert, but it's an improvement... the real test will come when we hang everything back up in there and shut the door...