Tag: paint

Something for the weekend

2 Comments

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.

Saturday: progress made

2 Comments

I was banished from the kitchen yesterday so Barry could do some work with his earphones in and I wouldn’t get in the way.  I felt like a bit of a spare part, but I sneaked in every now and again to take some photos and then run away.

The oven is steadily making its way to the middle of the space.  Barry’s also put it up on blocks so that it’ll be the same height as the work surface will be when that goes on.

We’re hoping to affix the plinth in some way along the bottom of the oven – we don’t want to be able to see this!

In other news, Barry’s swapped the broken radiator for the new one,

which hopefully won’t leak, and gone over the black paint that was already on that wall, as well as painting behind the radiator.

Hopefully, today we’ll get some more handles on the bottom units, although I’ve woken up early and it’s a lovely day, so we might actually need to go and get some Vitamin D.

The joiner also comes today, so we should finally have a date and proper price for sorting the worktop out.  Sink, ahoy!

Black as night

2 Comments

I’m off work today to wait in for a B&Q delivery (allegedly this should be the last).

This weekend, we took a deep breath and did it – we’ve painted most of the west wall in the kitchen black!  We decided against painting it with chalkboard paint, although looking at it, it’s probably the same stuff anyway.  Still need to do the edges but the majority’s done.

Barry’s also put the splashback under the cooker hood and built the unit that goes on the other side.

We also visited my ex-uncle this weekend with his broken and new sanders.  He was lovely about it and said we shouldn’t have, and there was much merriment about lending us tools that were on their way out!

Barry’s got lots of fiddly things to do now in the kitchen, like fixing the electric plug and gas hose behind the oven, starting to build a cupboard for the boiler, and then putting handles on all of the purple doors and drawers.  He’s going to ring the joiner this week as well; I cannot wait for the sink to be sorted!

A brief history of abodes

4 Comments

Today marks our fifth wedding anniversary – happy anniversary, honey!

We’ve actually been together more than ten years, since university, when our only source of decoration in the halls was books (his, sciences, mine, languages), posters (his, the tennis player with her bum out, mine, more embarrassingly, the Backstreet Boys) and interesting rugs (his, ratty strips of woven cloth, mine, a fluffy pink heart made of a wandering fibre that ended up on everything I owned).

We then moved to a shared house, where we had the whole top floor which had recently been renovated. Again, we had no power over what it looked like and function and utility reigned over beauty. The only painting Barry did was the bathroom ceiling, in a paint that just wouldn’t stick and turned out to have sand in it for some reason. It all peeled off.

In our third year, he worked in Peterborough while I lived in Spain and France. Spain was your typical apartment with tiled floors and airless rooms (pictured). My entire flat in France was smaller than our current bedroom. In the fourth year, we returned to (fancier) halls, in which I don’t think we even had posters or rugs.


At the end of that year, finally, we rented a house together just outside of the city which had a bit of character. The living room was on the third floor – very topsy turvy! The kitchen worktop had to be oiled regularly – I think Barry’s looking forward to doing that again. The bathroom was a horrendous aquamarine when we moved in, but we asked if we could paint it white and we were allowed.

The first house we bought was another magnolia kingdom. The couple we bought it from had lived in it for a few years and never done anything with it. Ha! we thought. Lazy buggers! We ended up painting this strip in the lounge a purply-chocolate colour, one wall in our bedroom green, a wall in our spare bedroom red, and the bathroom pink. Thus endeth our decorating of the first house.

Our current house is our second, and we nagged Barratt’s to death to get a cheaper price for it. It can be done! All of a sudden, the market will crash, and they won’t be able to give you it fast enough. That’s what happened to us, anyway. We ended up getting it for £25k less than next door, whose house is a mirror image of ours.

We fell in love immediately with the top floor when we saw the show home. It consists of our bedroom, a dressing room/nursery and ensuite. Light streams from opposite sides of the house and it feels huge and airy. The whole of the show home was very black and silver, but it did give us some excellent ideas, even if it’s taking until now to implement them (like black walls up the stairs).

As I’ve mentioned before, we’d love to have built in wardrobes, but they cost an arm and a leg. In fact, I’m not sure my arm and leg would cover the cost.

I was talking to Jules about house blindness (after the carpet discussion), and we’ve decided that once you’ve been in for a while, you just don’t see “it” any more. “It” can be the bland walls you see past, the nail pops you choose to ignore, the hideous (sorry, vintage) carpet you no longer look at. We’d been “planning” to decorate for some time before we actually started this January, but it took a shock this Christmas to actually make us get up and do something, because we needed a project to keep our minds off things.

As my friend Michelle says (and no, I’m not talking about myself in the third person), you always need a project.

Colour me beautiful

Leave a comment

I’ve been following a few other decorating/DIY blogs, and one writer has recently come up with a couple of kitchen posts I found interesting – one about white ones and one about kitchens with flashes of colour.  It’s nice to see trends on the other side of the pond, and shows how a bit of colour can really work.  I’m unsure about the brightly coloured units in three different shades in one kitchen though – it would have to be huge to carry that off.

I love the idea of having chalkboard paint from this blogger.  We’re having one wall matt black anyway, so we’re looking into this – it’s definitely a possibility!  From the big UK stores, I’ve found this one from B&Q, and this one from Wickes.  If anyone actually has experience of doing this, it would be much appreciated.  I’m not sure how much control you would have with a spray one, and I’m not sure how much you’d need to cover a wall that goes up the stairs!

Decorating begets decorating

2 Comments

Since we started decorating, we’ve found quite a few of our friends have decided to pick up a paintbrush. Do you think that decorating begets more decorating? Do you think we could use the word beget more?

Not only does revitalising one part of your house give yourself a nudge to keep going, but it seems to have a domino effect around you. The friends whose coat hooks Barry put up last weekend have decided to repaint, and I’ve even noticed that, by posting this as a blog, we’ve even influenced old school friends on facebook. That’s social media for you! I have to add a note that my old school friend somehow managed to paint her entire kitchen before 10.30am one day, but she maintains it’s a very small kitchen.

On a side note, Barry got a wall cupboard up yesterday, as well as fixing most of the end panels to the other ones. Apparently wall units are much easier; he just ran out of supplies so had to stop!

In my dream-addled brain, I actually thought our bed was in the kitchen when I woke up this morning!

Up and running

2 Comments

The oven is now functional! As evidenced, we plastered the last wall and had pizza last night. I can honestly say, it’s the nicest meal I think I’ve ever made in that oven.

It’s so satisfying, removing the plastic wrapping that’s around the oven. It will have to be popped back in its box while we sand and paint, but soon it will be free.

We spent last night checking we had what we thought we had from B&Q. Sadly, we don’t have what we thought. We’re missing:

  • 2 x cornice/ pelmet
  • 2 x pelmet

Fair enough, we knew about these. However, we’re also missing:

  • 2 x cooker hood filters
  • 1 x tap
  • 1 x wooden maintenance kit
  • 1 cupboard door (they sent us cream instead of white)

So our jobs list for this weekend is thus:

  • Ring B&Q to sort the above ASAP.
  • Sand.
  • Paint the ceiling and some walls (the important ones).
  • Start putting units together!

 

Dream a little dream

Leave a comment

I’m not a big fan of purple (so why did you get a purple kitchen, I hear you cry).  The truth is, I was seduced by it’s high gloss sexiness, and I wouldn’t change it.  But all of a sudden, purple kitchen accessories have been creeping in from the periphery, and I need to practice some self-control before it gets out of hand and I actually buy something.

Exhibits A and B, Your Honour.

Don’t tell me they’re not lovely.  I know they are.

The beauty of getting a new kitchen is that you technically then need new crockery, just the same as when the bedroom gets painted, I’ll be getting new bedding before you can say Jack Robinson.  Probably before we even paint it, to be honest.  Nothing’s caught my eye on the tableware front yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Update on the holey radiator – the eBay seller is sending us a new one, so that’s good news.  They’re even letting us keep the one with a hole in it!

K -4 days…

All that glitters

1 Comment

I love shiny things, sparkly things, bejewelled and sequinned things. Therefore, you shouldn’t be too surprised that when we got rid of the chandelier we used to have in the living room, I kept the sparkly things that used to hang from it.  Sorry to my friend Helen, to whom the chandelier was bequeathed, jewelless.

They’re not at all valuable – I think they’re just clear acrylic cut into a shape that catches the light – but I’m determined to find some possible use for these in my new living room.

I was thinking that if we had a pelmet above the window, I could somehow attach these to it and it would look really pretty. Either that, or it would look cheap and tacky, but it’s worth a try!

I still love the light we chose for our bedroom (pictured here), which was an Ikea find when we first moved in. We’re thinking about painting the wall behind our bed in this lovely rich Raspberry colour from Wickes, having the other walls Victorian White (also Wickes!), and then painting the skirts and doors gloss black.

I know I talk about Wickes a lot, but it’s our nearest DIY store so we’re up there a lot.




We were inspired by this photo in their paint catalogue, which was actually advertising coral paint, but we thought would work with their Raspberry too. You can get away with using any rich colour here, so we could even paint the dressing room (just off our room) a different colour, like this teal.


Barry’s been a busy little bee, plastering and sanding the walls in the kitchen of an evening.  They’re looking great, but it does look like a crime scene in which the fingerprint techs have been round the bottom two floors of our house searching for clues.

K – 6 days…

Busy making other plans

1 Comment

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?