The Neverending (House) Story

I last updated on the house a month or so ago. At that point (seems like a long, long time ago) I had had the plastering done and was deep in the middle of painting. I should be approaching the final stages now, right? Well, hmmmm, ish. Everything is taking such a very long time to do.

Post plastering everything was disgusting. So much cleaning to be done. All the cleaning.



We boshed on with the wallpapering.Can't wait to actually be there in the daylight to take some proper photos. It's so pretty!





After a prolonged discussion with the electrical engineers (I kept my temper. Barely) the electricity got fixed so the lights now work! That's been a huge help. We had one inspection lamp running off an extension lead and let me tell you, trying to wallpaper at 9pm with just that to help you see is not ideal.





I feel like I now know every single inch of the house rather intimately.  If it's wooden, I've probably painted it. Skirting boards, door frames, doors... lashings of lovely white paint have transformed them from grotty to gorgeous.






In my last post I mentioned how shit Frogtape was. This is what it does to the ceilings. Hours I spent up the top of a ladder, two tiny paintbrushes in hand. I think this Painty Barefaced Tramp look may be even better than Decorating Smurf.





Floors have been scrubbed and mopped and had bitumen chipped off them, revealing lovely (but impractical) quarry tiles underneath. We won't talk about what's happening upstairs though.




Lovely new blinds have been put in.

I met the cat from next door. I've christened him Bandit.


Having finally finished the walls and woodwork, this week I've been merrily occupied with wardrobes and cupboards. They're amazing spaces and I can't wait to stash all my stuff in them but they look horrid. With the aid of much expensive primer and paint, I'm gonna make them look lovely.





The place still looks like a total building site, even after many, many runs to the tip but I have a faint (probably misguided) hope that it'll all come magically together this week.




Want to know the funny thing?  I kinda need to move in next weekend (25/26 October). *hollow laugh*

What's still to do?

• The neverending painting should hopefully be concluded this weekend. Those wardrobe and cupboard doors need painting now they've been primed.
• Kitchen and bathroom need sprucing up but someone is coming to do that because I've lost the will to live when it comes to decorating.
• The electric works needs finishing off and the shower hooking up. That's being done on Monday. Woop!
• Parquet floor needs doing but that's booked for 27th October. Would have preferred it before I moved in but he's a busy man so I've taken what I can get.
• Carpets/flooring. Still haven't picked what I want. Argh. I'm hopefully doing it tomorrow but will they be able to come and fit them within a week? Who knows!
• The real stumbling block is that the plumbers who fitted the boiler etc have gone totally AWOL. Can't get in touch with them at all. The radiators need to go back on the walls and I have a fitted but not-working boiler which needs firing up. And I can't get the flooring fitted until the radiators are back up. Helpful eh?

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.


*[]*

A Bit Of A House Update

Basically, I get clobbered with an overwhelming sense of gloom every time I step through the front door.

I should be all "YAY!" because the wallpaper steaming is finally done. Yes, even the awkward bits that involved stanley knives and mega awkward upside down scraping whilst getting my face boiled off by steam. DONE.

But I'm not yay. I am Little Miss Feeling Sick because scraping all that wallpaper off has revealed some extra damp patches and some fairly monstrous cracks and awful ceilings that need boarding out. Urgghhhhhh, it looks like such a mess at the moment.  Plus I can't do anything now.  I'm itching to get in and start actually decorating but I can't decorate until it's been plastered and oh yeah, there's still no electricity because they have to wait till the plastering is done before fitting the switches and sockets and guess what? Plasterers are the bane of my life at the moment.

I went back yesterday and looked at my diary entries from the house-hunting process at the start of the year.  Want to know what I wrote?  "I don't mind something that needs decorating but I don't think I can cope with something that needs loads of repairs."

*hollow laugh*










I've found interesting things underneath all the crap though.


Mary Poppins in the plaster


Parquet flooring!


And a record of how tall Sarah was in 1977 (not very)


I'm off to give someone an actual month's salary to fix all the walls and ceilings. My plan is to not go back there till that's done and it looks like a proper house again.