Further Tales From The Decorating Front

I promised you a house update so here goes...

At the end of the last one I was busy feeling sick about all the cracks in the walls and waiting anxiously for the plastering to take place.

 Well, the plasterers have been.  They did a grand job but OHMYGODTHEMESS. Even worse than when the plumbers ripped out the boiler.



Approximately 27 trips to the tip later and it looked somewhat better.  Nice when it's all done and you've got actual walls and ceilings!

I don't know why I've now got a hoe in my house. It just appeared.

I severely underestimated how long it takes to prep a room for painting.  The place was filthy (still is). It took about two days to chip all the plaster residue off the wooden surfaces and get it vaguely clean enough so that the walls and ceilings could be painted.

My ever-awesome father made a beautiful job of painting the ceilings.  I donned my decorating smurf costume and attempted to help but just gave myself a crick in the neck.  I'm too short/inept to successfully do it.

Luckily I am excellent at scrambling up and down ladders and doing finicky things so I did all the pre-painting taping things off which also takes ages but is rather satisfying. What's not so satisfying is when you take the bloody stuff off and it brings half the paint with it. You had one job, Frogtape!! Useless.

I then spent four hours going up and down ladders with two tiny paintbrushes in hand, fixing it. Felt like a trampy version of Michaelangelo.

Wall painting is much more fun.

Deciding on colours is hard though. The living room was dead easy (green, obvs) and although all of these shades look pretty much the same in their tester pots, the library colour was obvious once we'd painted some sample splodges (Honey Dip won).

The hall colour proved more difficult.  Who knew there were so many shades of yellow?

Then my equally awesome Mum, she of the precise eye and wallpapering skills, was drafted in to help with the next stages.  So we have wallpaper.  Glittery wallpaper!

And shiny, clean, freshly-painted skirting boards!  Also pipes and radiators and stuff that I neglected to take a snap of.

The contractors have been busily doing their thing too.  The electricity hasn't actually been turned on yet (something to do with Manweb and earthing...I dunno) but the lights are up. All hail the tacky green chandelier!

I can now get in the loft. That's nice!

I'm trying to arrange for someone to come and rescue the parquet flooring cos I really don't want to have to cover it up again.

But I was delighted to rip the crappy old stair carpet off to discover that my vision for the stairs is basically a case of restoring them back to how they were in the past! I want painted stairs with a carpet strip up the middle and that's what I'm having.

Oooh, well done if you've made it through all that lot.

I go through stages of feeling awesome about what the house will look like when it's done and stages of feeling utterly despondent about how long it's all taking and how much there still is to do. This has been a nice exercise in reminding myself how much has actually been achieved so far though.  It's getting there.

It was very nice to sit down on Sunday, cast the paint brushes to one side for half an hour and dive into this beautiful Decorating with Colour book which I got from Farrow & Ball. It came at a perfect time. Strange as it may sound, my gloom about the state of my house was immediately lifted by looking at sumptuous photos of other houses. You'd think it'd work the other way and send me into even deeper gloom, wouldn't you?  Nope!  I was all "oooh, pretty" and "right, I want that library!" instead.

Now obviously I can't turn a two-bed terrace into an airy Italian palazzo or ancient English country cottage but I don't think they exactly expect that.  It's all about inspiration, isn't it?  I can't be an interior designer but I can damn well pinch their good ideas! This book is chockablock with them.  Every single page has a paint colour or a design idea that I want to steal.  Just don't think the house is quite big enough to fit them all in...

The only slight downside is that I now have extreme bookshelf and cushion envy.

Seriously, I want that cushion so badly.  Help.


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