Plasterific

all filled in 1

Thanks to Barry, the holes in the ceiling in the living room and kitchen are now filled in and the living room lights are once again a-go-go.  It’s nice to see his lovely face again.  Whilst it added ambience, the light from the one standing lamp dragged from upstairs wasn’t excellent for eating tea by.

all filled in 2

We now have many huge grey patches of plaster that need to be sanded and repainted, but that’s going to wait until after Scarlett’s tea party when we are permitted to have a dusty house!

Sorry for the awful cameraphone shots!  If you looked down, you would see a hungry baby sat on my foot in this one.

There’s a hole in my ceiling

holey moley

Dear Liza, dear Liza.  Our living room lights decided to stop working last week.  If you’re a regular reader, you may already be in possession of the very useful fact that we have 13 lights in our living room.

These are the holes that poor Barry has had to saw into the ceiling that he painstakingly plastered after putting the lights in.

holey moley 2

He’s decided to forgo sourcing the problem after we lost count of the holes, and has instead run another wire from the kitchen into the living room, bypassing the problem area before the ceiling fell in on our heads.

Barry’s mum and dad are visiting at the end of next week (for Scarlett’s first birthday, already!), so the pressure’s on to make it right!

Branas, I’ve been expecting you

20130730-125526.jpgYou may recall that we have an Ikea Expedit unit in our lounge, and back in… ooh, February, erm, 2012, I expressed a desire to pop some little white baskets in those gaps.  Those little white baskets cost £15 each, and as we wanted to fill 10 of the holes (the bottom two rows), that’s a hefty trip to Ikea without all the random napkins I pick up on the way round.  And the meatballs, of course.

Well, we’ve been forced into buying something for them, mostly because our five month old has just started rolling and I swear she was eyeing up those DVDs.

Our first stop was musicmagpie.co.uk, which is one of those sites that buy your stuff for next to nothing and undoubtedly sell it on for a huge profit.  I couldn’t be bothered to eBay all the stuff, with all the Post Office faff and my track record in buyers (I had another one recently with a dress I sold to a person who clearly can’t read), so I downloaded the app onto my phone and zapped the CDs and DVDs with the barcode scanner.  That was fun for a bit, but it gets a bit depressing getting £0.21 for your childhood.  We’ve also kept really random ones (we couldn’t possibly give everything away), so I couldn’t sell Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill as I clearly remember buying it with my own money, nor could I allow Barry to pimp Con Air.  He’s kept Bad Boys I and II (naturally) and Ghostbusters, but wasn’t bothered about any of his CDs.

In the end, we sold 185 items for £61.07.  Don’t work out the average, it’s so depressing it’s unreal.  The most we got for an item sold was £3.00 for a series of Friends.  Sob!

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Anyway, off we popped to Ikea, but those eagle eyes among you will have noticed that £60 will not 10 baskets buy.  We’ve ended up buying two lovely baskets, and the rest cheap white cloth boxes, a veritable bargain at £2.50 each.  I think they’ll get dirty fairly quickly, but they’re a good placeholder for more baskets or drawers later down the line.

Photo wall… tick!

Hallelujah, the photo wall is done!  I think it was one of those jobs where the thought of actually doing it was more taxing than the actual action of doing it.  As I mentioned, I have some family coming over today for the bank holiday weekend, so we’ve bitten the bullet and just done it.    I keep walking into the living room and they take me by surprise, as I’m so used to that wall being empty now!

In my humble opinion, I think it looks great!  I sat down on Friday and updated the mock up I’d done in Illustrator, and we used that as a rough guide.  There’s still a few spaces for more photos, so we can add to it if we want to.

So… here it is!  All 24 photos (for now).

Procrastination with good reason

Oh dear, oh dear.  I haven’t posted in almost a month, and literally nothing’s changed, house-wise.  A lot’s been changing with me, but house-wise it’s exactly the same.

The prints are all safely nestled in their frames, and are waiting patiently on the dining room table to be put up on the wall.  According to Barry, I’m in charge of logistics of how we’re going to arrange them.  That should go well.  The pressure’s on to get them up this weekend, because my Aunty and cousins are coming on Monday for the first time and we want it to look great.

In kitchen news, the great black wall still lies unfinished, and we’re going to cave.  Next door have given us the number of a painter/decorator so we’re going to get a quote.  In the last month, Barry’s moved jobs as well as started his own company, and it’s just not going to happen, so we’d rather get it sorted.  The stairs are going to be a major issue anyway, best leave it to the professionals.

As well as the black wall, I think we’ll get a quote for our room to be painted so it no longer looks like a shooting’s taken place, and (wait for it), we’ll need our third bedroom painting as it looks like that will be the nursery.

Yes, I’m pregnant, up the duff, bun in the oven, knocked up.  14 weeks and 2 days to be precise.  I’ll try not to harp on about it, I know it’s not a baby blog, but my mind has been on other things lately and I’m poring over prams instead of paint like porn in my lunch hour.

We were dithering about which room to make the nursery.  To begin with, the baby can reside in our little nook off our main bedroom, but I think it would be nice to do up a bedroom for when it’s ready to move on and be a bit more independent.  At about 6 months.  Charlie’s giving us lots of good advice, and she thinks that would be good for the daytime anyway, and then the baby can get used to the room.

We initially thought the spare room with the yellow bed, as it’s the nearest to our bedroom. However, Barry’s made the excellent point that it’s nearer the road, and therefore noisier.  They’re both the same size, so I think we’re going to go with the one that’s further back.  We’ll have to get rid of the double bed that’s in there, but I think we’ll get a nice fold-out sofa bed in there for when Barry’s family comes over.

We won’t know what colour we’re going for until around October time (forget team yellow, we want to know!), which is also putting the brakes on which colour and design of pram we want.  For anyone who’s interested, we’re getting an iCandy.  Now I’m going to daydream…

Prints

Prints for the living room wall have now been ordered, all 24 of them!  Got an excellent deal through Quidco for Photobox as well – 30% off + 5% cashback.  Ker-ching!

My brother’s moving house this weekend, so we’re moseying on over to see the new pad.  Don’t know about you, but if we have one thing to do on a weekend at the moment, it means that the rest of the weekend becomes null and void and we don’t want to plan anything else!  Think that means we’re getting old.

It’s also my Nanna and Grandad’s 50th wedding anniversary this weekend, and I’m very excited that I found them some gold dinnerware for a present (don’t worry, they’re not silver surfers!).  I also got a lovely card printed with their wedding photo from Moonpig.  We’re all going out for a meal a week on Saturday with the rest of the family to celebrate.

PS – the new Batman was very good, 4/5, I recommend it!

It’s a frame up

Sorry, sorry, I know, I’m a terrible person.  You would think I would be eager to write my 100th post, but we’ve been doing so little house-wise (read: nothing) that I’ve not been able to admit it.

We seem to have negated this inaction by spending £120 on white frames in Ikea.  Now I know this sounds like a lot of money, but we had almost three quarters of this already from the bits and bobs we put on eBay in the last few months, and the living room is looking so bland without these finishing touches that we thought we’d just bite the bullet.  Plus, it’s near TGI Fridays and we deserve Jack Daniels chicken.  I digress.

We also picked up some white boxes for the units, but decided that £120 was enough for one day and put them back.

For this princely sum, we purchased 24 frames – 4 x A4, 11 x A5 (ish), and 5 x smaller ones (5 x 7″) and 4 x even smaller ones (4 x 6″).  We ended up going for two different styles, Sondrum and Ribba.  24 is less than we were going to have originally, but when we looked at my mock up from March it seemed a bit crowded.

With it being payday next week, we’re going to wait to buy the prints, but they should be around £30 from photobox.co.uk.  As I mentioned way back in January, I’ve turned them all black and white and they should look amazing!  Not sure how we’re going to arrange them yet – looks like it may be a difficult thing to measure.  Watch this space…

Beading… check!

Barry’s got the beading fitted in the living room.  We think we’re going to just paint the skirting boards in the kitchen, and then maybe seal them, rather than fitting beading, as we’ve put the skirts back on over the flooring (whereas in the living room, they’ve had to go up to the edges).

 

He started by trying to stick them with adhesive, but our walls fool you into thinking that they’re straight.  They’re not.  He’s hammered little tacks in now so that they’re more snug against the skirting boards.

We’ve also brought all of our DVDs and CDs back into the living room.  After having the units empty for so long (since January!), it’s a shock to the eyeballs, and I’m not sure I like it!

We do still need to buy the bits (cupboards/drawers/baskets) for the unit, so that may help the eyeball issue.

Wardrobes

After all I said I was going to get from my mum’s, we’ve decided not to have the wardrobes in the end.  I think it’s overfacing Barry, who seems to have reached his limit on DIY for the year and is staging some kind of protest.

We really need to get cracking again – at least to finish off the last bits of the kitchen and living room, but going on holiday and eating out (almost) every night isn’t really conducive to pockets full of money to spend on picture frames.

Of our kitchen jobs still to do, we have the following left…

1. Sand and repaint the ceiling

2. Cut skirting boards to size and repaint

3. Fit skirting boards

4. Finish painting the kitchen walls

5. Finish sanding and fit the peninsula

6. Tile the kitchen walls

7. Paint the stairs wall, handrail and ceiling

8. Replace all of the switches with brushed silver ones

9. Get a condenser tumble dryer

The living room list’s not much better…

1. Sand and repaint wall and paint skirting boards

2. Paint the skirting boards and cut and fit the beading

3. Paint the kitchen/living room door (both sides) and the doorframe on the other side

4. Paint a radiator

5. And another one

6. Fit the strip thing between the kitchen and living room

7. Create the photo wall – finalise photos and buy frames and prints

8. Buy white drawers and baskets for the units

 

I need a lie down.

Skirting boards fitted

Barry’s done a bit more in the kitchen – only took a couple of hours but it makes a real difference.  He’s fitted the skirting boards back and they look really great!  They still need repainting.  He’s also run silicone around the bottom of the units and added the strip that joins the living room floor to the kitchen floor.  That’s 2.5/8 of the kitchen tasks done and 3.5/8 of the living room ones!