Tag: living room

Check! Check!

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Although we didn’t do much this weekend, I did cross off a few tasks from the Depressing visual representation of all the jobs left to do: the living room, namely task 1, half of task 2 and task 3.

1. Sand and repaint wall and paint skirting boards
Barry was making a stand about not doing any DIY last weekend, so I did all this with my own fair hands. In the beginning, he wasn’t even willing to instruct me on how to do it, but he gave in in the end and gave me a bit of idea!

I had to cut away the cracked parts of the wall before I could sand. Very nervous with Stanley knives as in very clumsy! Then I had to caulk the wall (cue lots of jokes about loving caulk). I ended up caulking half the wall that was left to paint as it was so cracked from the flooring being put in.

2. Paint these skirting boards and cut and fit the beading
I painted all of the remaining skirts, but the beading still needs to be done.








3. Paint this door (both sides) and the doorframe on the other side
I did all of this, which took a few hours. I may have mentioned that we are going on a fancy dress pub crawl this weekend. On Sunday, I watched Supergirl (to get into character), and we watched the first three Indiana Jones films. I say watched, I was just listening because you can’t see the TV from the door/floor behind the sofa.

We were also prepared to have a good crack at tasks 7 and 8 (getting white frames, drawers and baskets), but who knew Ikea was closed on Easter Sunday?

Probably won’t get anything done this coming weekend – it’s Barry’s birthday and we have people staying over again, so may not have much to report.

Depressing visual representation of all the jobs left to do: the living room

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In the second of this two-part mini-series, I take a closer look at the living room, and all the things we still need to do.  Click here for yesterday’s gripping instalment.

1. Sand and repaint wall and paint skirting boards

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

3. Paint this door (both sides) and the doorframe on the other side

4. Paint this radiator

5. And this 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

Hit the floor

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The living room floor is in!  We still have some work to do (painting skirts/painting radiators/painting doors/putting beading on/never mind the photo wall), but we can walk on it, and it looks great!  I think Barry has RSI from putting it in, and he couldn’t face starting the kitchen.

A couple of things we were selling on eBay finished yesterday – the radiator with the leak went, and the kitchen trolley thing went for £102!  That will cover either the photo wall, or a trip to Ikea to get some white drawers etc.  I really didn’t want to leave the red ones in because they hurt my eyes now because they don’t match, but Barry won’t let me take them out, because we use them, or some such reason.  Progress photos below.

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?

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!

Pinteresting

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I know I’ve mentioned this before, but Pinterest is brilliant!  I thought you may want to see a couple of my boards as they stand.

I keep spotting some lovely accessories and pinning them to my boards, and it’s easy to see if they’ll fit with the theme, so I’d highly recommend it if you’re decorating.  I’ve pinned photos of items on there from B&Q, Wickes, Argos, Dulux, the list goes on…

As an example, I’ve just found these lovely curtains on the left in the Next sale for the living room.  I can clearly see that they complement the room’s theme.  However!  A word of warning.  I pinned this photo onto my Pinterest board and was going to wait until payday to buy them.  Then I thought I’d better get them as they’re on sale.  They were all gone, in every size, when I went back an hour later.  I’m naturally suspicious, and event one might have nothing to do with the other, but if you see something on sale, buy it before you pin it!

This is my kitchen board.  I’m lusting after some gorgeous tableware from John Lewis at the moment, but, being realistic, £9.99 for a cup is out of my price range, unless we start buying one piece of crockery a month!

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Busy making other plans

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For those of you who are interested, here are the floor plans of our house.  Actually, these are a mirror image and the kitchen’s now extended to where the hall and bathroom were, but you get the gist.  They’re actually the floor plans of our house style from Barratts.

This should hopefully make more sense now for people who are finding it hard to picture where rooms are in relation to each other.

When we’ve finished the kitchen, we’ll need to finish off the living room, and then we are planning to either decorate our bedroom or do the garden.  We really need to look at our bedroom, because we’ve got tester paints on the wall, which immediately makes it look like a work in progress.  When we paint the kitchen, that will also involve painting up the bottom set of stairs (which will be a giant pain), and I imagine the top stairs will get done when our bedroom is painted.  Fitted wardrobes would be nice, but a distant dream at the moment.

Our ensuite will probably be next after that.  Barry’s enamoured with those shower units where you buy the entire thing, no grouting or tiling required, and I know he’s got his beady eye on something similar to go around the bath in the bathroom on the middle floor.  Basically, he hates tiling.  Who can blame him?

The spare bedrooms are the last on the list.  While we obviously want our guests to have a lovely stay with us, the effort and expense of decorating two rooms that get used less than once a month can wait.  But I will make them a cup of tea when they stay.  Fair dos?

To paint, or not to paint

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As I mentioned in my very first post, our living room was black and red before it got reincarnated as the current green/grey paradise.  With us plumping for white for the flooring and picture frames, the existing black and red furniture doesn’t exactly match.

We got rid of the giant red light quickly (someone got a very good deal on eBay for that), and the remaining culprits are the Ikea Expedit units in black times two, and the red drawer inserts that go with them (although I’ve just noticed that Ikea don’t seem to do red ones any more).  We get away with the sofa as it’s mostly grey.

I’ve ummed and ahed about painting the furniture, even going as far as to paint a splodge of the Boudoir on the back of one of the drawers to see if it would hold.  It came off with my fingernail.  I’ve consulted a colleague at work (hello again, Michelle!), who’s advised me that to paint this kind of finish, for either the drawers or the units, would involve sanding, priming, painting, repainting, and then an adhesive spray for dessert.

The beauty of Ikea is that it’s so cheap, you can just go and get some more.  The current shelving would fit in our room, or spare rooms, or could just go on eBay, but I’m really reluctant to hand over another £124 for the two units, plus £52 for two sets of drawers, cheap as they are.  Having said that, it would probably cost me more than that in time and money on all the priming and spraying equipment.  There’s the additional worry that if we went all white, it could look plasticky and cheap.  Or like heaven.

Decisions, decisions.  Anyway, despite my innate aversion to wicker, I do like these little Branas baskets that Ikea do (surprise, surprise), and would definitely find space for them somewhere.

Recommendations are welcomed.  Although this isn’t a pressing issue, it is something I could be doing while Barry’s tearing walls down/plastering them up again, and I’d quite like my own corner to be proud of.  Speaking of plastering, here’s the latest picture of the “bathroom”.  And the radiator’s been ordered.  Sweet warmth is on its way!

In other news, K -8 days.  No pressure.

And the Lord said go forth and multiply your lights

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Or something like that.

My husband seems to have harboured a heretofore unrealised passion for lights.  Our living room previously had two ceiling lights – one over the living area, and one over the dining area.  We now have 13.  I’m not kidding.

As mentioned previously, I fell in love with the Argos lights which we’ve built our room around, and this involved changing a single chandelier-style light to two of those instead, leaving a giant hole gouged in our ceiling.

We replaced our huge red light over the living area with a Belize light from Argos, which is a lot more discreet, and will make guests feel a little less like they’re being questioned when it’s on.

Then the husband decided that he’d quite like spotlights across the back wall.  We went for these inoffensive ones from Wickes, and initially he only wanted to have five or six, but I convinced him he really meant all ten.  As it turned out, joists run across where he was drilling, and he ended up having to drill holes in between every light he put in just so he could carve a notch to hide the wiring.

We spent a weekend plastering these holes, and all of the other various dents in the walls that we hadn’t noticed until now, and I got a brief lesson in grit size of sandpaper.  That may or not have been when I took the Reader’s Digest DIY Manual to bed.

Anyway, we’ve now got the bulk of the painting done, just the edges to tidy up, and we’re pleased as punch with our choices so far.

While all this was going on, we decided to have a mosey on down to B&Q and see what the kitchen situation was.  Over Christmas, we were telling my mother-in-law how we can’t use the downstairs loo as it emits a terrible smell.  Actually, it does that whether we’ve used it or next-door-but-one uses it, I think the pipes haven’t got enough of an angle to clear the waste.  Our house is over three floors, and we currently have a toilet on each floor, but our guests are asked to use the one on the middle floor anyway, due to the building problem (yes, we complained, as have our neighbours; they cleared them once but it’s recurring and we’re wasting our breath).  She made a passing suggestion for us to knock down the walls around the loo, as well as one of the kitchen walls, to make a giant kitchen!

I’ll post separately about the kitchen situation, but the long and short of it is that we’ve bought one, but decided to fit flooring in the living room after we’ve fitted the kitchen so that it doesn’t get wrecked.  RIP to the cream living room carpet, by the way, which now looks like it’s been attacked by paint.

I’ve fallen in love with this first white flooring by Quickstep, called Elina Wenge Passionata.  I’ve seen varying prices between £11 odd and £30 per square metre, and at 24m2, plus all the extras, it’s quite expensive (to us).  Cheapest we saw it at was NCS Flooring.

Ever practical, my husband ordered samples of a similar (but not the same!) flooring, which is Quickstep Girona white chestnut.  It’s got more of a grey tinge, which doesn’t offend me as the walls are grey, but I think the white would have lifted the room more.  We’ll have to see, but I think we’ll have to go with this as it’s almost half the price!