It's a Green House

Week 3 was when we saw some really big changes, I was off work that week and we had the plastering booked for Monday, kitchen fitting and construction work for the rest of the week and I had plans to get on with getting some rooms prepped and painted so we could get carpets ordered (at the time of writing this weeks later we still don't have any rooms painted or carpets so that part obviously went well!). The downstairs of the house was out of action for me this week as the living room was full of the kitchen in flat pack boxes, and the kitchen was having various work done on it all week. My plan was to work on the bedroom and hallway, getting all the wallpaper stripped and the ceilings painted and the walls prepped. We got the kitchen plastered on the Monday, which made a great leap forward in how the room looked, and the kitchen fitter came on Tuesday to assemble all the base cabinets (nothing could go on the walls for a few days while the plaster dried). Some photos ar...

Week two is where it started getting real and walls started coming down. The first weekend we had the house my dad came over and fitted the steel support beam, and started taking down the kitchen walls! As a reminder this is what it looked like before This photo shows the start of the work and where the beam sits in relation to the living room, there was another hole on the opposite wall for the beam to slot in. Once the support system was all in place the wall started to be knocked down! We were left with it looking like this after the main demolition work was done (that hunk of concrete was taken off I just snapped this picture while we were waiting for someone with a larger cutting tool to come and do it!) You can see where my brother had started on the electrical work in these photos, as the room that we were going to use as the kitchen had been a dining room before it had no counter level plugs (and actually only one double socket for the whole roo...

We have covered the before photos here , so lets get into what happened in the first week of us owning the house. It was certainly all go and we got a lot of the prep work out of the way. I will lump all of it in together now and in the next few posts in week or two week blocks to give a timeline and an idea of what the process was, but I will do some more in depth posts later about different parts of the renovation. To start with we started stripping what felt like about 5 ton of wood chip wallpaper from the walls and the ceilings. It. Was. Everywhere. Why you would take the time to wallpaper a ceiling is beyond me, but the previous owners did. So here we are, stripping the ceilings. We were both working on this for the first few weeks on and off between other jobs, in the first week we were both working so we went up in the evenings to do this and meet with people for quotes and plans to be made. Here are some photos, lots of the paper had been layered over other paper, and then...

Time for the "before" photos of our house! It doesn't look like this now, but this is it the day after we bought it. We didn't actually move in right away for reasons that will become evident further down this post, so it is all still empty in these photos and its a little bit dark as it was early in the morning but I wanted to get working right away so had to get these photos in quickly! The front door didn't work at the time which was a lovely surprise on getting the keys (its been replaced now along with all the windows) but if it had then we would have entered into this good size porch area. The old front door here hiding its face in shame. Then through into a small hall, on the right is the door to the living room. This is a pretty dark stairwell so we plan to take up the dark carpet and replace it with a lighter one and paint the walls a light colour. Also it was quite cold in the porch with the old door and a single pane window next...