No Mo' Au-bergine!

Well, Mum & Dad, it's the update you've been waiting for (almost)... the spare room is clear and decorated!  Although we don't want the bed yet, still got all those doors to plane/strip/paint/rehang, and our new free space is just the place to do all this!  Next week, I promise!

Anyway, I'm sure you remember the state of our spare room:

And how we tidied it and blogged about tidying it more than once...

Well, now we've not only tidied it, but we've cleared out all the rubbish and painted it and hung actual curtains in the windows that have been curtainless for almost 6 years.  We threw a ton of crap out and are still sorting through some stuff (why is it so hard to get rid of stuff even though you haven't even thought about it for years?) but hopefully with a big push this week and next we should be all sorted.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...

Tadaaaa!

I told you the wardrobe would eventually be painted too!

We were decorating using the curtains as inspiration, so after looking through a lot of taupey-grey paints we settled on Skimming Stone from Farrow & Ball, and we love it.  No more shiny aubergine wall.  No more badly painted shiny yellowing walls.  I also found a new passion for filling when patching all the dents in the walls.  So relaxing and rewarding and thinking about it now I had probably breathed in too much dust and it addled my brain but still, patching walls is fun!  I may or may not have run around the house shouting for Kevin to point out more places that needed to be filled, and he may or may not have told me that I'm crazy, but pointed out places anyway.

The skirting boards got a new coat of Crown Milk White silk paint after we pried off the floor edging and scraped all the old paint off it.  Apparently the people we bought the flat from were very slapdash in their decorating.  Although, we sort of can't blame them, because we found more evidence of the previous colour scheme in that room.  The walls were bright pinky-red, the carpet (some is still in the wardrobe) was dark pink, and the skirting boards were... bright blue-green.  Lovely.

Once the skirting was painted I glued the edging back on, which was trickier than you might think.  We have a nice cartridge of Serious Stuff glue, which had managed to glue itself shut at the bottom end so that it's impossible to squeeze anymore.  But I didn't let that stop me, oh no!  I got the longest skinniest screwdriver we own and used that to jam in the nozzle of the tube and use as a spatula once it was nice and covered in glue.  Which was a bit time consuming, but hey, it worked, and the edging is still stuck down.  I also gave the radiator a couple of coats of Hammerite, and now it's not yellowed anymore!  I did spend about 5 minutes just staring at it once it was done, but I blame at least three of those minutes on the fumes.  I blame a lot on fumes, you may have noticed.

Anyway, remember that lovely picture above of all that lovely floor and space and openness and joy?  Well, about two hours after that was taken, this happened:

You didn't think I was gonna waste the opportunity to make a mess, did you?  Hah!  In all seriousness though, it's awesome to have that space to work in instead of painting things in the living room and worrying about the carpet and breathing in the fumes all day.  So, here's what happened in the hour or so after that pic: 

 

 

The plan is to get the drawers done, then use them as the base for a desk to go next to the wardrobe (which we'll hopefully get done next week).  But more on that in another post, I'm off for my dinner followed by another round of painting and varnishing and trying to avoid flicking varnish all over the walls.  Wish me luck!