So, first of all, I finished painting the biggest wall in our living room. It's all shiny and blue and pale cream now, woo! It took a lot of scraping and filling and sticking bits of dado rail back on but it doesn't look half bad considering the state of the wall (oh how I love matt paint!).
I painted the whole wall with cheap matt white paint from Homebase first, because it took four coats of the coloured paint to get decent coverage on the first wall I did, and I didn't want to waste the expensive paint.
Then, only two coats of Crown White Scatter paint above and Borrowed Light by Farrow & Ball below the dado (which incidentally is painted in Crown Milk White silk paint) and it was done! This was including a little scrape and sand between each coat just to get the wall as smooth as possible. Ta-dah!
You can see in the far corner how much lighter it looks now, I l-o-v-e the new colour scheme!
After that was done we decided that the next wall to tackle will be the other big wall (though there's less to do because of the fireplace). Before we get on with that though, we thought we'd dismantle (or should that be dis-mantel, ahahaha. No?) the mantelpiece to repaint it.
When we first moved in it was varnished in a hideous dark orange colour. I'm not sure you can tell from these photos just how cheap it looks, but it wasn't very nice. I'm not against varnished wood at all, btw, our dining table is a cheap pine Ikea jobby that I painted and varnished to make it look a bit nicer, and I love it. But yeah, the mantelpiece varnish, yuk. So after a couple of months of living with it I painted it with some cream coloured semi-gloss paint that the previous owners had left behind, and it looked a whole lot more liveable with... until it started to chip. Which happened pretty quickly because I hadn't bothered to do anything to it before painting, and paint on top of varnish equals not so permanent.
Anyway, back to the present: after four years of chippedness surrounding the fireplace we thought we may as well get it sorted properly while we were working on that wall. After pricing up new fireplaces/mantelpieces we figured we were stuck with what we have, which isn't too bad, as it's pretty standard looking and if it's a choice between living with a boring fireplace or shelling out a few hundred squids for an only-slightly-nicer new one then we're all for the cheapo option (especially Kevin, the world's tightest man).
The dismantling took about half an hour of prising, bashing, then finally realising that bits were screwed in so unscrewing them, but it was quite theraputic.
I chipped off as much paint as I could (thankfully without a heat gun thanks to my brilliant forethought - painting over varnish with no prep) which took a couple of hours in front of the TV. Note the awful varnish (and it looked way tackier in real life).
Then Kevin used his crazy vibrating sander to sand off the varnish/paint from the pieces and they're now just waiting for me to prime and paint them this time. Look, I'm doing it all properly this time, go me!
We also decided to look for tiles to tile around the actual fireplace, because the current surround isn't to our taste. It's a sort of marble-chips look, and if it was all in one piece we probably would keep it because it's fairly non-descript, sort of a light pinky-brown colour, but the hearth piece is actually broken in two, and it's very noticable because of the amount of soot in the crack. Haha crack. Sorry.
We popped to B&Q for some other bits and pieces and although the tiles we'd found on their website weren't in stock, we found some in the almost exact same colour as the blue we're painting the walls. And they were discounted to £3 for 25 tiles. It's like fate.
So seven packs of tiles came home with us and will be lovingly applied (okay, maybe not lovingly, but dutifully and at the very least carefully) to our fire surround sometime soon. Huzzah!
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