Week 3

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 are a bit dark as we didn't have any lights in the kitchen at this point, and it was winter so the light wasn't great.

It was starting to look like a kitchen! I also filled a hole in the floor from removal of the walls and a gas pipe using a self levelling floor kit (and by the light of an old  lamp we found in the loft no less...poor planning on my part to start it as it was getting dark!). It was super easy even in the dark, just prime the surfaces and then mix and pour the stuff in, its sets really quickly too but I wanted to leave it overnight to set fully before the kitchen fitter needed to be in there more. 

While the work was going on in the kitchen I spent the Monday stripping the rest of the bedroom wallpaper from the walls and ceiling. After taking off the paper I scrubbed the ceilings and the walls with sugar soap and got any glue residue off, there was coving in this room but it was made from polystyrene and had been dented, cracked and had old paint etc on it so it just looked too rough to keep and I took it down.

There were patches where the glue on the coving had pulled off paint and even some plaster when it came off so these were filled and sanded. There was also a bit of a crack around the ceiling but nothing a bit of filler and caulk wouldn't cover.

It was looking better by the end of Monday but not quite ready for paint, on Tuesday we needed to remove all the old wall plugs, picture hooks etc, fill any holes or rough areas or cracks in the ceiling paint (anything large enough to show through paint) and do some caulking along the ceiling line to cover the cracked paint and the boarded up fireplace which we were going to re cover as it had bowed a bit. We also planned to get the chimney checked to see if it was capped at some point.

Tuesday Tom was off work as well so we planed to crack on and get the bedroom prepped and start painting so we could then go and order carpets and this room would be done enough to move furniture into once the carpet arrived (it would need lots of other bits doing but the bed was still dismantled at this point and we were sleeping in the spare room). We tried to pop off the skirting boards ready to paint and they turned out to be original terracotta tiles. Its such a shame they were in such bad condition as I would love to have kept them but they had been painted over so many times they were just not going to be taken back to the original colour. They are dotted around the house and a few of the window sills are made out of them, but unfortunately a lot have been painted over (badly) so many times I'm not sure what we will be able to keep. Fingers crossed for a few windowsills though! Also a lot of rooms have partially these tiles and partially other skirting boards and it just looks mismatched :(

We started taking them off so that we could add on regular skirting board...and then all the plaster fell off under the window. Seems it was being held up by the tiles!

Damn. OK so we weren't going to be painting this room today. We tested the plaster around that patch and a lot of it was just falling away so we took it back to the point where it started looking OK and called the plasterers (who had just been the day before!).

As we clearly were not going to be painting the room that day we started to look at the fireplace to re cover it with new plaster board. We opened it up and cleared out all the old soot, egg shell (it seems the chimney was not capped) and random bricks and gave it a good sweep. I came to the conclusion that I loved it and wanted to keep it open.

As we were going to have to have plastering done anyway in this room we figured why not take off some plaster from the chimney breast to see what it looked like. If it was rough or ugly we could just get it covered up again. Turns out it was a cute little brick chimney breast and fireplace. I'm picturing it with some tiles inside (maybe any of the terracotta ones we can salvage) and a mirror over the fireplace.

We got the rest of the plaster off and gave it all a good clean and it is definitely a keeper :)

I also figured why not continue with the paint prep anyway on the other walls and carried on filling and sanding the walls I had been working on. I will cover more on thorough prep for painting in another post as we did a lot of it through the house!

I decided to just paint a coat of white anyway on the three walls with plaster and the ceiling as it was only going to be one one wall being plastered, may as well get it out of the way and close the door on this room until the plastering is done!

The fireplace looks even better with the rest of the wall painted (really wish I moved the ladder for this photo!)

Thursday I was preparing for the plumber to come and fix the leak in the bathroom (the one we talked about last week with the bit of carpet in the ceiling to soak it up!), to save on the time that he was there (and billing us for) I was going to get the leaky pipe exposed ready. I thought I would just peel back the lino and be able to pull up floor boards. Nope, nothing quite so simple as that in this house! There was a layer of plywood underneath the lino, to keep it smooth and so the floorboards don't show through in dents in the lino, which makes sense. What doesn't make sense it tacking that plywood down every few inches.

Eventually I got there though and got the lino peeled back (being careful not to rip it as we would need to stick it back down made it slightly more complicated) and the plywood and floorboards ripped up.

While the plumber was getting on with fixing the leak and also replacing the bathroom radiator which had a leak too (with the old kitchen radiator), I got on with stripping the last of the hallway and stairs wallpaper and scrubbing that with sugar soap too. It was already brightening up from how it looked before, even with rough stairs and walls!

Meanwhile Chris the kitchen fitter had been working away all week and the kitchen was looking like this by the Friday!

Next post will cover week 4 and onward, which was the final week before we had to move in, we will have a partially finished kitchen, a surprise partial bathroom renovation and a partially finished living room ceiling. Should have named the blog "half finished renovations I'm documenting in the hope they look good at the end" ;)