Front Lounge Part 19

OOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo... White room is WHITE! 

So Sunhine has been painting the skirting boards and picture rails in "antique white" (I've stayed out of there as the gloss paint is pretty fume-y...) and now that everything is dry, we've re-installed all the electrics and we have a had a good cleaning session in there including cleaning out the windows ... Oh my! How art-gallery like does it all look! It is so uplifting in there and the room catches the evening light beautifully. So looking forward to setting up our office/workshop in there ... bring it on I say!

As it happens, apart from a small snagging list, all the four main rooms are DONE! Hallway and the kitchen etc left to do ... but that's quite separate. We can now move on to sourcing furniture, getting shelves made, making curtains and general beautifying... oh so exciting!

Phew, I need a holiday ....

Front Lounge Part 18

Man, what an annoying last couple of days ... So all that varnishing Sunshine did on the floor? It pulled out the old dark stain even more... And considering how white the rest of the room is, it looked dreadful! We sat around on the floor dejectedly wondering if we could put up with it and maybe think about re-painting in a few years time ... and I thought, actually, no. It would just annoy us every day. It was better to just bite the bullet and buy white floor paint. The sort that is paint and varnish in one. Ok so we are not going to get the whitewashed look we wanted, but its much better than having a floor that looks mouldy green and yellow ...*

So we took the weekend off DIY (we so needed it) and wondered around the Bristol Harbour Festival instead; and then yesterday went and got ourselves white floor paint - and I am so glad that we did! We sanded the floor lightly first (interesting how much leg hair Sunshine sheds!), vacuumed, and then painted a coat on. You're meant to do two coats but one was enough as we already had several coats of paint and varnish underneath.

Today Sunshine has been fitting skirting boards while I have been filling around plug sockets and bits of wall that we had hoped would be behind the skirting board but were peeking out. So a bit more wall paint touching up to do as well when all the plaster dries.

*In hindsight, we should have used some kind of latex paint initially rather than emulsion paint - it would have probably stopped the stain coming through ... but hey ho, its a learning process I guess ...

Front Lounge Part 17

Much has happened in the last few days. We whitewashed the floor - 50/50 emulsion and water, which I applied with a roller and then Sunshine wiped into the boards and wiped the excess off. It was looking fine till we let it dry and looked at it in the daylight the next day and saw that a lot of the dark stain from how the boards had been before had started too come up (I guess the water in the dilute emulsion mix did it? I don't know ...). We had done a test board first but that board didn't have a lot of stains left ... so anyways, the stain was coming through as a greeny yellow and looked like mould so we put a bit more of this dilute paint down on bits that were looking a bit rubbish. The floor was no longer as whitewashed as we wanted, but we could live with it. Sunshine then went and got some polyurethane floor varnish to seal it all off.

We also in the meantime (while waiting for the varnish to dry) managed to fill and sand wherever the skirting boards needed and give them a couple of coats of base coat. Fortunately the weather had also got better so we are now able to do some stuff out in the back garden.

Front Lounge Part 16

Mmmmm... all major wall and ceiling painting done ....

Front Lounge Part 15

Today we had a little visitor come and help us with the DIY ;)

More coats of paint went on and Sunshine started cutting and planing some of the skirting boards to size. The plane makes a LOT of really high pitched noise (I have my own ear-defenders too) and so I stayed out of the room while Sunshine was busy at it ...

Front Lounge Part 14

Yesterday we tidied up  as much as we could as all the sanding had made quite a bit off dust. This included finishing off all the wall filling and sanding, vacuuming the walls and washing down the ceiling (and filling and sanding it too). First coat of white paint went on the walls today - including the ceiling which was just not very absorbant so was really hard to do.

Its nice to work in the summer as the days are so long and it isn't freezing cold without a radiator. Slowly but surely we are making progress.

Front Lounge Part 13

Since the last update, we have cleared everything out and Sunshine has been on a sanding mission. He planed any boards that were not lying level; then sanded the edges with a belt sander; and then yesterday we hired a proper floor sander and he did the rest of the floor. I have been going in periodically tidying up or filling around plug sockets ...

The floor looks pretty good - we've tried to get as much of the really dark previous stain off but a lot of it is pretty ingrained. But we're happy with how its come out.

Front Lounge Part 12

A bunch of things have progressed in the last few days... I've gotten on with sanding and filling the walls where they needed to. Fortunately there was no textured wallpaper in here, but the wallpapering that had been done was done fairly shoddily so I had to go round tidying bits up.

Sunshine got on with finishing off the floorboards - including filling knots and nail holes with wood filler. We also had some more wall-socket recessing to do as we decided we wanted internet cables coming out of the walls too.

And Sunshine's dad came round and helped him with cutting and positioning the little wooden wallplates needed to affix the skirting boards to the walls. After, Sunshine drilled holes in the walls for them and I went round screwing them to the walls. Electric screwdrivers are the best!

Front Lounge Part 11

In the last couple of days we've been fitting in floorboards where we'd lost some - mainly in the alcoves, in front of the "fireplace", and around the new radiator plumbing. Sunshine spent quite a lot of time trying to squeeze all the tongues and grooves together - as it turns out the floor boards from next door that we salvaged are a slightly different width to the ones in this room ... so we had to work around that ... and the fact that they had got damp and slightly warped didn't help either ... but we're getting there.

In the meantime, clearing this room out has meant that our beautifully finished back lounge is full of boxes again ... I so can't wait for us to have all our things in the rooms they need to be in!

London with Allen

We've been in London this week as Sunshine had his students exhibiting at New Designers. I like to tag along as it gives me an excuse to see the show and also catch up with London friends.
This time we stayed with our friend Allen who has been  stationed in London the last month working on his dissertation on the ethnomusicography of tabla makers ... and yes, he plays too. 

Sunshine didn't have to spend all his time with the students so when he had a bit of time off we walked round London visiting an art exhibition in the Barbican Centre, strolled round the Southbank and ending up with a lovely pub dinner  near where I used to live 8 years ago. All the bits of London that I love ...

Front Lounge Part 10

Before we started again on the front room, Sunshine decided it would be a good idea to install the new radiators (one for this room and one for the hall) that had been sitting in their packaging in our hallway for the last few months. Fortunately it being summer we could drain them all and get on with changing the plumbing (the new radiators were both slightly different dimensions to the old ones); working out how and where to place them on the wall (the hallway one had to clear the pedals on our tandem!) and at the same time not spring a leak.

My darling husband is handyman extraodinaire! He got on with it all weekend while I kept clearing things out of the room ... my, have we got a lot of "stuff"! I also had to get on with choosing and repairing some old floorboards. We broke some when we re-did the floor in here last year and we salvaged some from next door. But the next door ones have been in the horrendous rain (albeit under tarp cover) that has been the UK the last couple of months. So we had to pick the least mouldy and warped boards, clean them up, dry them out, and glue and tidy bits that needed repairing.