Tag: DIY

Here we go!

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The flooring is here!  We had a manic day yesterday.  Barry had the opticians in the morning, and of course, that was the time when the pallet of floorboards came.  The man couldn’t get the pallet trolley thing up the path, so left it in the road.  I was literally running in and out of the house, just in case a car reversed into the pallet.  Then Barry came back, and wondered why I was running round shouting “Cones!  Get some cones!”.  We don’t have cones, but he thought it was funny.  I did not.

He then started laying the flooring in the living room.  I tried to help, but I’m relegated to underlay (because it doesn’t matter as nobody sees it).  I’m also permitted to put little protective feet on furniture and unwrap the next pack of flooring.  Oh yes, I know his game.

We also squeezed in a cinema trip (Wrath of the Titans, 1.5/5, don’t bother) and a trip to Nando’s to see some old uni friends.

We’ve got two sets of visitors coming over the Easter weekend, so the pressure’s on to get the flooring in (although we still need to paint the skirts and radiators in the living room before putting the beading in, but that can wait).  The paint’s cracking at the bottom where we’re hammering flooring against it, so that needs sanding off and redoing.  Also, Barry’s working in London all week, so he’s not going to be productive from there!

Sunday is supposed to be the day of rest.  It isn’t in our house!  Onwards!

Photos of the flooring so far…

Shotgun approach

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In response to Wednesday’s post, someone commented to ask if we’re working on our entire house at once.  Of course not! was my first reaction.  Then, as I started writing out the reply, it really did begin to look like we are, in fact, trying to take on the entire house at the same time.

This was my reply:

We started with the living room in January, which quickly spread to the kitchen, so we’re working on all of the ground floor at the same time. We’ve got a big splodge of tester paint in our bedroom, and we know what we want to do with that. We need to finish painting black up the stairs, and then do it on the top floor too, but we also want to put decking in the garden soon…

Damn.  Barry’s forever telling me that we can’t do everything at once, much as I’d like to.  Financially, we definitely can’t do everything at once (unless the lottery plan comes together), and it will probably go very quiet for the rest of this month once we have the flooring in.  I am, however, gearing up for some excellent before and after shots.

It’s easy to get carried away.  I know I’ve talked (or typed) before about DIY and decorating influencing your friends, but it also has a snowball effect on yourselves.  The more we do, the more we want to do, and now that a certain part of the house is almost done and looks great (well, we think so!), it makes you want to keep going.  Just need to rein it in a little bit!  We haven’t even got to photo wall month yet, and we’re already thinking about decking.  In the meantime, our bedroom still looks like a crime scene.  What will we tackle next?

Kitchen excitement

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Well, the new flooring arrives tomorrow, and I’m very excited!  We are also going to Nando’s tomorrow, so Barry’s very excited!  This is our kitchen floor as is – a bit industrial for my taste.

We’ve got the table and chairs I wanted from Argos; they’re winging their little way to us now (well, in the next 35 days).  There’s a bit of a story behind this.

My mum came round for tea the other night and I had a fantastic menu planned: to start, grilled flat mushrooms filled with dolcelatte, with a balsamic glaze and small side salad.  For the main event, a lamb tagine with La Kama spices, honey and fresh ginger, with a variety of fresh vegetables and a side of spiced couscous.  For dessert, buns fresh from the oven, baked by my own fair hand.

Mum was supposed to arrive after 7pm, when she’d had her hair done and driven over to Bradford.  In the meantime, I was going to get my skates on after work – jump on the bus, nip to Morrisons, dash round the shop and get home.  Unpack the shopping, stick the tagine in, get changed, clean the bathroom, and start preparing the starter and dessert.

Instead, this is what happened: Mum text me at 4.30pm with the following:

Hi love i am in asda bradford do u need owt ? Hair cancelled x x

My heart rate immediately tripled and my work colleagues had to tell me to calm down.  I replied:

Oh bugger, I’ve got to go to morrisons to get some shopping because I thought I had time!xx

I will get it here darl if u would like me to x x

My colleague Michelle T told me to just tell her what I wanted from the shop (thereby skipping the trip to Morrisons myself).  I text the list back:

Would you please get: big flat mushrooms, dolcelatte, bag of baby spinach, lamb, courgettes, 1% (or semi skimmed) milk and a cauliflower?  Oh, and a bottle of asti.xx

This is when it started falling apart, because the shop didn’t have everything I needed for my careful plans.  She thought dolcelatte was a type of mushroom, and picked up cauliflower and broccoli pieces because they didn’t have a whole one.  Trying to direct your mother to a very specific blue-veined cheese in a shop you don’t frequent, while trying to get home in time to beat her (be quicker than her, not hit her) is quite difficult to do.

In the end, she suggested that we just get a curry.  We both agreed that a curry was, indeed, the best course of action, would be cheaper, and that she definitely still needed to bring two bottles of Asti back with her.  I beat her back to mine, did a rush cleaning job, got changed and spoke to my brother before she got back to my house with the vino.  Phew!

Anyway, she had been trying to buy us a kitchen table for three-and-a-half years as a housewarming gift, but we’d never had the space before.  She’s taken pity on us, and is finally buying us the table and chairs.  I realise now that this has nothing to do with the meal story, but I’ve kept it in anyway as an idea of what my life is actually like.  I live on a knife edge.  Hurray for future breakfasts in the kitchen!

Change of plans

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I’m kind of sulking, because I’m not going to be able to chop up our units to make a dressing table.  The neverending saga of me not having a dressing table continues.  I suppose if I ever actually got one, it wouldn’t be neverending.

Instead, we’ve decided to leave the units as they are, and replace the red stuff with white stuff.  Otherwise, it’d be white on white on white, and that’s clearly too much white.

As I said before, we will still be having white drawers/cupboards/wicker baskets in the units, but it won’t be quite as clinical as we first thought.

Barry’s asked me to clarify why he’s wearing sunglasses inside on yesterday’s post.  It’s not that he’s too cool for school, is a pimp, or has some strange eye disease.  No!  It was just incredibly sunny this Sunday – so sunny, he had to wear sunglasses inside.

I also wanted to show off that we got tickets to the Sunday of Radio 1’s Hackney weekend, and am super excited about it!  If my friend Rach picks up her phone, we might even have somewhere to stay for the night…

I’ve just remembered that I promised our living room carpet to Jaime many moons ago.  I’m afraid it’s not going to be much use to anybody (it’s covered in splashes of paint), and Charlie and Jaime did get their carpets redone about a year ago, so I’m hoping he’ll forgive us when we throw it away!

Slowly but surely

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We had a busy weekend planned, so didn’t get much house stuff done. On the plus side, we got to play with Finley (Charlie and Jaime’s super-cute and ridiculously clever baby), saw The Hunger Games (the book’s better; knocked half a point off for shaky cam; 3/5), and had a delicious Sunday dinner at Charlie and Jaime’s. We even ate outside in the sunshine! Fly count: 1. It has been decreed, Barry can no longer use the fly excuse not to eat outside.

Anyway, between all that, Barry did a bit of painting. Not art. He painted the alcove (again, please watch In Bruges to find this funny!) and the windowsill is all glossy as well. A photo didn’t really do it justice, so I’ve scrapped the one just of the windowsill. Still got sanding and painting to do, but we are steadily getting there.



Very excited about the flooring coming on Saturday. We got it from a sale at www.infloor.co.uk, which was by far the cheapest we’ve seen it. No idea how long it’ll take to put in though.

As an aside, we also saw The Cabin In The Woods last night. Also 3/5. Would have given it more apart from the gaping plot holes, although it was funny and shocking at the same time.

Lottery

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Do you ever think of the things you would change (house-wise) if you won the lottery? I do!

Win over a certain amount, and obviously you could move (which we would – why would you live in a semi-detached house?), but if you won a less life-changing amount, you could still make some dramatic changes. I like the thought of not having to wait to decorate rooms. We could have our bedroom painted at the same time as decking is being put into the garden. Built in wardrobes? Not a problem. Dressing table? I’ll take two.

Having said all that, as long as we’re in this house, the kitchen will always be the kitchen Barry put in with his own bare hands. We’ve agonised over flooring, and waited until payday to buy the next lot of paint. I’m not trying to say I would’t appreciate the money (I definitely would), but there’s pride to be had in working for it too.

Photo wall

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While all the kitchen malarky’s been going on, I’ve also been thinking about our photo wall for the living room.  I’ve mocked up the photos on Illustrator, and it’s been really helpful to visualise how it will look.

This has made me realise that we need to whittle down the photos more, and scale down some of the ones we were going to have printed A4, so it has been a useful exercise.  Definitely need to look at it again before buying anything!

It’s hard to know where to start with this, because I’ve never done this before, but this has been a cheaper way of discovering I’ve gone a bit overboard than buying all the photos and frames, and then realising it!

Tables and chairs

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I’m looking at tables and chairs for the kitchen.  We’ve talked about having stools and having the extra bit of wood as a breakfast bar, but I’m anti-stools in principle.  I don’t enjoy balancing as I eat.  The extra bit of wood has to wait until we get the flooring in anyway, as we need to fix the pipe (that’s just arrived) to the floor to hold it up.

I’ve got my beady eye on these white chairs and matching table from Argos, but Barry prefers the purple, which I don’t think matches.  I also like these ones, which are on offer at the moment, but we’ve just bought the flooring, so I think they’ll have to wait a while.  You can have a look at them with the other stuff on my Pinterest kitchen pinboard.

I am looking forward to having breakfast in our shiny kitchen!

As a side note, you may notice that I’ve added a bunch of buttons on the right to make it easier for people to find and follow me.  Most of them were copied from Karen’s blog (thank you!).

As yet another side note,  I’ve committed us to the raspberry paint I mentioned before on our bedroom wall, although at the moment, it does like someone was shot and killed against it, and then the killer tried to clean it.  It’ll be better when the whole thing’s pink.

Something for the weekend

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Along with going to see The Hunger Games on Saturday and Sunday dinner on Sunday (both with our best buds Charlie and Jaime, hi guys!), we’ve got a few kitchen tasks for this weekend…

  • Paint the alcove. If you aren’t thinking quotes from In Bruges right now, I pity you.  This is the alcove (right).  Or do you say nooks and crannies?
  • Sand and paint the ceiling.
  • Cut the peninsula to the right size. Barry’s just bought a shiny new circular saw and is itching to try it out, despite the fact we can’t put it up until the flooring’s in.
  • List the radiator and butcher’s block trolley on eBay.  Because we all know how much I love my customers.
  • Order flooring. We’ve made the following mathematical calculation:

a + b = c

Where a = concrete flooring, b = £100 off online sale and c = credit card.

Barry put one of those pop up plugs into the worktop yesterday. Scary drilling a huge hole into our shiny new worktop, but it looks fine! A post for the peninsula is on its way. eBay is good for so many things!

We also bought one of those paint pads with the tiny wheel a few weeks ago. They’re supposed to create a straight line at the edges when you’re

painting, but Barry’s had another crack at the black paint and it doesn’t seem to have made a blind bit of difference.

Barry put the shiny new curtains up yesterday too.  They’re a lot thinner than our last ones, but they’re pretty!  I could always line them if it’s a problem.

Almost there

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Barry’s been a busy boy (say that five times quickly after a few drinks). He’s made the box to cover the fuse box. Twice. I didn’t like the purple on white action, so he had to make another door in white.

He’s also been sawing away at the cornices and pelmets, so they’re done, and we’ve made the interesting discovery that Tipp-Ex ® is nigh on exactly the same white as our wall units. Good to know.

This means that the units are done!  The peninsula can’t be made until we’ve got the flooring in, so that’s it for now.

We’ve been comparing the flooring samples to the units; it’s definitely got to be white. For the quantity we’re wanting for the kitchen and living room, it’s of no benefit to us to get two rooms’ worth together, so we may split it into separate lots so we can at least have one room sorted. It will definitely be the kitchen first due to the concrete flooring!

We’ve also put the dining room table back up because it doesn’t look like flooring in there will be changed very soon and we’re both tired of eating off our knees in front of the TV.

You know the drill, photos below!