Front Bedroom Part 5

Weekend comes around and we start work again. Today was lots and lots of wall prep. Infact we started last night with sanding down the wall to make sure there were no rough patches; marking up deep holes; filling them in and then sanding them down again. Today was just more of that (much easier to do it in daylight!). You have to do several passes of this as its difficult to spot all the holes that need filling and sanding on just one go. You'll often find holes that need filling whilst you're sanding another filled one. Generates a lot of dust too so both of us ended up having quite salt-n-pepper hair and looking like old biddies ;)

To get to all the walls, we also had to drain and take off the radiator - man what a mission! There were lots of spanners and buckets and thumbs holding valves closed while one of us panicked and the other ran round looking for spare newspaper and rags to mop up the leaks. Got there in the end though ... as you can see, the radiator was inspected (and we assume installed) on 24th July 1972 - almost 40 years ago! I found some funky orange wallpaper behind the wall brackets - will have to take a photo of those soon.

And while we were at it, Sunshine decided that we might as well recess the plug sockets (they stick quite a bit out of the walls so we decided to get them inside the walls. Here is Sunshine doing the manly drilling-out-holes with a mega drill; setting in a new socket box, then plaster filling it into the wall. Three double sockets to do round this room. Also this room has only one light fitting (smack in the middle of the room) but I decided we need two. So we had to make two new holes in the ceiling; get into the attic and pull the current wire out; move it to one of our new holes; and fill the old hole. Eventually we can wire in to the second of our new holes too. I think that will work much better than the current set-up.

We wanted to start lining-papering today but all this prepping took a long time. We also had a 30th birthday party to get to that evening. So in the last hour we cleared everything up; vacuumed; put down dust sheets and brought up all the wallpapering stuff ready for tomorrow.