Since the last post back in December when the house was ‘essentially’ finished, we’ve been making it into a home and finishing (most of) the little jobs that still remained. We’ve also done the garden had the BBC do our garden, … Continue reading
It’s been a long time since I took some proper photographs of the house with my proper camera and lights etc.
As I had a bit of time to spare (yeah you read that right) I thought I’d take the opportunity to get a few photographs. It’s a bit odd really as obviously our lives for the past couple of years have been the house and you only realise that its not on this blog when you look through it. When you’ve spend a week fitting flooring and looking at flooring, and touching flooring and pretty much being flooring you just assume that the whole world knows about your flooring and the last thing you really fancy doing is taking pictures of the flooring.
So any way. Here’s some pictures.
First up is the dining room and living room with the Christmas decorations up. A few things to finish off in here; mainly curtains and pictures
This is just a quick shot of the kitchen so you can see how its progressing. I’ll do a proper shoot in here once we finally have our stools, bookshelf and some pictures. Continue reading
This is the blog I’ve been looking forward to for MONTHS. And now it is here it is so lovely and satisfying that it was almost worth the wait (you’ll have to ask Ally if it was worth the effort as he did it.)
As you’ll have seen we had our herringbone floor delivered three weeks ago. Ally took some time off work and got to it, and I think he’s done a marvellous job! There were issues with the nail gun which meant every single board had to be nailed in by hand following the initial drive from the nail gun. It took a long time, and the angles were very hard to work out.
Here’s the dining room, mid-job.
We have had a mammoth three weeks in terms of work at the house so there are just too many photos to post in one single blog. This is your Part One. AND, progress has been so quick that many of these photos are already out of date, and most of them will be by the end of tomorrow when *drumroll please* we’ll get the carpet laid on the stairs and landing.
In preparation for that, last weekend Ally prepped the floors. As you may remember from last time we talked about prepping for carpets, this is both to prevent drafts and to extend the life of the carpet.
We’ve been working really hard to try and get the house all sorted and cosy for Christmas, focusing on making the whole shebang presentable so we can worry about the details later.
Details such as cushions and curtains, etc. Although I did spend a few hours making these beauties for the lounge as I was tired of the place looking like a student flat with a load of mismatching bits and pieces. These blue cushions, combined with a terracotta piping (pretty good for my first attempt), work to pull together the colours we have in the room. I’m really pleased with them!
This is primarily a photo post to keep you up to date. We had the carpets fitted in September but they mis-measured the second bedroom so it was a bit of a kerfuffle and they had to come back later. Their mistake luckily so it didn’t cost us anything! However, it means we kinda forgot about updating you all with pictures immediately after the event.
But here they are now!
Our bedroom is really getting there. All we really need for it to be finished is to put some pictures up, particularly in the frame above the bed. We think we’ve picked one of Ally’s photos to do the job, but we’re keeping our eyes open for anything really.
Continue reading
So, all has been quiet on the blog front for a while and that is because we’ve had a few really busy weeks: We went up to Edinburgh to visit our new niece and, had a long bank holiday weekend with my family and then took the weekend off for my birthday.
So what were we doing at the house this weekend to warrant a blog post, I hear you ask? We were preparing the floor for carpets! The title was in no way a spoiler!
Now for most people, this would simply be a case of emptying the room, lifting the existing carpet and sitting down with a cup of tea to reflect on a job well done. But we don’t do things the easy way.
We over-boarded the floors with fibreboard and then siliconed/taped the edges to ensure an airtight seal. This is important because it prevents draughts, improves the efficiency of the mechanical ventilation and (most importantly in my view) extends the life of the carpet by preventing soot and dust accumulating around the base of the skirting board. Continue reading
As you may have seen if you’re a cool kid and follow me on Instagram, the biggest news is that we now have a fully installed and working proper bona fide KITCHEN! Yeah man! We are missing a microwave/oven that’s … Continue reading
The kitchen finally arrived today! We’ll (well, Ally and his dad) will be fitting it next week, and the worktops will be templated and fitted the following week.
So, hopefully in three weeks we’ll have a fully functioning finished kitchen – for the first time since we left Ambrose Street in December 2013.
Please excuse the photos!
It’s been another hectic couple of months with me studying for and sitting an exam, and work continuing apace in the house.
We’ve been ticking off some of the final really big jobs and have actually ordered the kitchen (soon to be delivered) and organised carpets for upstairs (to be fitted when risk of damage is reduced).
So the really, really big job that we’ve been dreading for months and really should have done this time last year was sorting out the floor in the living room, dining room and hall. The two rooms had a really severe hump in the floor down the middle of the rooms and the joists in the bay were clearly past it. There were countless large holes in the floor in the hall too. Given that the house is now fully decorated it was, quite frankly, letting the side down.
Given the severity of the bow we were warned by the builder that it could be a very big job but luckily it was fairly straightforward. We spent a day lifting the floorboards and de-nailing the joists and here’s how it looked when we were done, pretty scary!
Our Renovation Project 