Living Room - Time for some destruction

So this makeover was actually quite some time ago now, but we are at the point of selling our home, and I want to make sure I capture all that we have done on this house before we move on and I forget!  So, lets begin on all that has been achieved on the house in the last 18 months...

First up, the living room...

Now, when we bought the house the living room contained all the textures you could ever imagine.  Textured wallpaper on the walls painted yellow, textured wallpaper on the ceiling, damaged polystyrene coving, and a foul green carpet - yum!  It also didn't help that on Day 1 of owning the house we had it rewired so there were also a LOT of chases around the room too (not helped by the fact that we have 10 double sockets in here now - yes 10!)

After a few months of living here, we bought a cheap tub of magnolia paint to slap on the walls to cover up the chases and make it look vaguely more attractive.  The texture was temporarily staying until we had the time and financial resource to tackle it.

Roll forward another year to about March 2016, when we decided enough was enough.  I couldn't bear looking at the texture anymore.  We hated the room so much we barely used it - so it was time to rectify that.  Starting with stripping the wallpaper... oh my!

I completely underestimated how long this would take.  My chosen tools were a wet cloth and a scraper, but after several looong days, it was clear that these just weren't cutting the mustard.  After a plea on Instgram, my fellow instagrammers guided me to getting a wallpaper steamer and a Zinsser Paper Tiger.  The BEST money I have EVER spent.  My life is transformed! I have always been nervous about using a steamer as I've heard horror stories of it damaging the plaster behind.  I already knew that these walls were going to need re-skimming though, so I thought what the heck.   Absolutely no problems with damage because of the wallpaper steamer and I feel like a bit of divvy that I didn't invest sooner .

As you can see below though, after the wallpaper came off, the walls were significantly cracked behind - so as anticipated, this was going to be another job for me to plaster.

In good news, when removing the fireplace, I did find £10 behind it - wooo! That will pay for the renovation right?!

Can you see the gorgeous texture? Yum!

This was about 4 hours work, pre the steamer!

Absolute came changers!

SO much progress, and a facial in one!

We had a steel lintel installed above this window a few years ago (read all about that here), but this had clearly disrupted some of the plaster on the inside.  We just didn't realise before as the wallpaper was holding it all together!  So some patching up was required here.

I also came across some rather unsightly cracks, larger than most.  I put some scrim tape over these cracks to hopefully prevent the crack coming through my new plaster finish.  18 months on and it's still going strong with no crack present in the surface so I'm pleased with how it turned out.

And this is how we lived for a few months.  We sold our sofa for pittance and bought in the garden chairs from the garage.  The bunnies appreciated them though! Haha!

The next step was to strip the wallpaper from the ceiling.  There was also some fairly sizeable cracks between the boards so they would need refixing.  Not long in, I decided it was going to be easier to get a fresh start o the ceiling with new boards, and may even be quicker that way too.  So, as you do, we pulled the old ceiling down, textured wallpaper and all.

Buh-bye textured wallpaper!

What a mess! I never fail to underestimate how far and wide the dust spreads in the house.  And this is where I shall leave you until the next installment when we will start putting everything back together again!

Total spend:

Wallpaper steamer £25

Zinsser paper tiger £14.99

TOTAL: £39.99

(We also sold all our furniture and the fireplace surround, so we were actually making money at this point!)

2016 Review, and 2017 House Goals

I've had a long time away from the blog.  I wasn't feeling passionate enough about it, and I have been working so hard on the house, that the irony is that whilst I've had a heck of a lot to write about, I have also had very little time to write about it.  I'm hoping to resurrect it though, as I've got an awful lot to catch the blog up on, and I want to continue to document everything I have achieved with this house.

I originally wrote the post below over Christmas as a draft, but didn't get round to finishing it.  It's obviously now May... oops!  So some of it may sound a little strange, but it was true at the time, so please bear with!

2016 Review

This time last year, I set out in this post my goals for 2016.  At the time they didn't all seem achievable, but I thought I would have a good crack at them anyway.  Here is what I set out to get done, and how we got on:

1. Start demo-ing the living room
The plan here was to start the renovation of the living room, but with dwindling funds I did not foresee finishing this project in 2016.
Well, I can tell you now, we absolutely smashed this room!  We started the demo in about March time I think which started with wallpaper stripping and pulling the ceiling down, and had mostly finished the project by the end of August.  I still need to update the blog with all the details of this project, but here is a sneak peek of the Befores on this project.

2. Patch up and Repaint the front of the house
This was such an easy one, I can't believe it took us until November to actually get it done.  Again, another one to update the blog with....

3. Finish the Hallway
We finally did all the finishing touches to the hallway - yay!  I just love it now. Here is the post with the final reveal.

4. Get the garage water tight
The old cement roof really was a bit past it... The water poured in when it rained and it was looking all very sorry for itself.  Well over Easter 2016 we smashed the roof to bits and put on a new shiny roof which is full waterproof - yay!  It looks so much better and the garage is now a really functional storage space for us.  And I mean, what better excuse to have a right clean out of the garage.  Not only was there all our stuff in there, the previous owners had left various bits too.  So that was a fab achievement of 2016.

Read about it all here and here.

5. Learn how to plaster
After spending a LOT on plastering, and not being completely happy with the quality, I decided it's something I could certainly have a go at.  Whilst most things I YouTube, I thought this skill would take a bit more finessing, so I booked myself onto a course in February 2016.  It was two whole weekends in Newark, and it was hard work, but I learned a lot, and I was certainly willing to give it a go in our house.
Since being on the course I have plastered the box room (hubby's office), the living room and our kitchen diner.  It's a skill I now have for life and I have already well made my money back on the course and the equipment. Success.
Read all about the course here.

2017 Goals

Now I've summarised the success of my 2016 goals, I suppose I should probably set some goals for 2017!

1. Remove all of the unwanted texture from the house (i.e artex)
This is heavily linked to Goal 2 below.  The last remaining unwanted texture is in the kitchen diner (walls and ceiling arrrgh), and the house just isn't big enough for the both of us. It's not me, it's you.

2. Overhaul the kitchen. 
There is just so much that I dislike about our kitchen.  When we moved in, it was the best room in the house, and I've seen a lot worse kitchens than ours.  But it wasn't to my taste, has too much texture, and not enough storage  A complete overhaul is required in 2017....

3. Get the vegetable patch going again
We completely neglected the vegetable patch last year as we were away in Australia for a month over August and September so there was no point doing much as we knew our efforts would be wasted in our absence.  This year we will have fruit and veg in abundance.  That's the plan anyway...

4. Refresh the bathroom
It's been three years since we bought the house in February so it's also three years since we did the bathroom.  We originally did the bathroom on a non existent budget and in a hurry, so now I've had three years to swoon over everyone elses bathrooms over on Instagram I'm not quite feeling the love anymore.  I think the key thing to change is the wall colour - it's currently Magnolia, and much to my husband's delight, I'm coming round to the idea that we could do with less magnolia in our lives.

5. Learn how to have a work / life / DIY balance
I'm terrible at balance.  I'm either all or nothing, and I really struggle with DIY projects not to let them consume my life for weeks on end.  It's usually because I cause such high levels of destruction that I'm quite keen to get our house back into some sort of liveable state that I kill myself trying to get it back together.  This means that I have zero social life and I just work and DIY, nothing else.  I'm looking forward to doing some smaller DIY projects this year that allow me to take or leave them, and our house isn't going to be insufferable if I'm not in the mood to finish said project.  Stay tuned to see how I get on!

K x