A Mini Update or Two

Just a couple of mini updates for you (mum!)...

Numero uno, we've rearranged the living room.  Well, technically I rearranged the living room and Kevin approved so we've now got a better layout that makes the room seem much bigger (no pics, sorry, you'll just have to take my word for it).  However, with the good comes the bad, and in this case it's some lovely dents in our carpet where the sofa used to be.  I looked online for a solution and the most popular suggestion seemed to be leaving ice cubes on the carpet overnight.  Now this, weirdly, I do have pictures of...

Before

During 

(I'm not sure why I think this needs a during picture, as it's essentially just some ice cubes on carpet, but I took the picture, so I'm gonna make you look at it!)

After

Well, it sort of worked, but not really.  I think this may possibly be because it's not a wool carpet, it's some kind of poly-something-or-other I think.  I know for sure it melts when you drop an iron on it, anyway.

The carpet is definitely a bit fluffier, but still obviously flattened.  I've been fluffing up the pile with a wire brush twice a day for a few days now, and it seems to be helping a little bit, but the dents are still there if you look closely.  I'm hoping they'll eventually disappear, or I'll find some other clever solution.  Or more likely we'll just stop noticing them and live with it!



Mini update number two... the kitchen!

Kevin's brother recently posted some pictures on Facebook of him tiling his kitchen with some gorgeous black subway tiles.  I mentioned to Kevin that they were exactly what I had been dreaming of for our kitchen, only in white, but the only nice ones I'd found had been quite expensive.  He asked his brother where he got the tiles from and they're from Homebase and only £6.99 for a pack of 25.  So obviously we rushed out to get them.  And then we didn't get them because we had a boot full of other stuff and would be back the next day.  Well, we went back the next day and they were totally sold out, as were all the other Homebase stores in the whole flippin' city.  Luckily, it was Mothers' Day and Kevin had planned to visit his parents' house, and the Homebase near them had like a million of them in stock, so he was able to pick some up.  Hooray for mothers!  And Kevins! 

We bought some gorgeous stainless steel edging from B&Q, which was twice the price of a pack of tiles for less than two metres, but totally worth it for the look.  We were originally going to get the silver finish, but in the shop we saw the stainless steel, and as our hob, oven and sink are all stainless steel, we thought it might be nice to match.

Before we started we mocked up a (very!) rough picture on Photoshop to see if what we were planning would look okay.  We wanted to do three tiles high the length of the worktop, with maybe a five tile high splashback behind the hob.

This is the most before-y pic I have, the tiles are just resting against the wall.

As you can see, I'm amazing at Photoshop, what can I say, it's a gift...  Anyway, we decided against going five tiles high behind the hob, as we didn't really need to and it looked cleaner with a long line of straight tiles.

Kevin has been sawing the edging to fit, and I've been doing the tiling, and so far this is what we've got (bear in mind it's not grouted yet, we're going with white):

So, we're not done yet, we have an extra section of worktop to add, along with the wine rack (which we use as a tea towel holder, 'cause we're cool like that) and a space for baking trays, but so far I think we've made good progress.

Well, that's it for a mini update.  I've also been painting various boring items of furniture but nothing else blogworthy has been happening around here.  We're planning on doing loads more to the kitchen over the next couple of weeks so who knows, there may be another post in the near future... no promises though!

We're Still Here!

Just to confirm, we are still alive!  We've been tackling lots of little jobs lately, so here's a quick look at various bits and bobs we've been up to.

• Covering the gas meter.

For five years we've been looking at this delightful sight in the corner of our living room.  Even with the TV stand in front of it it's still obviously there and taunting us.  We need easy access to it for meter readings, and didn't want to get complicated building a cupboard around it, so I designed a three sided cover that could just be placed over the top and leant against the walls, and Kevin built it.  So from the awfulness above we have this invisibleness (almost) instead:

You can't see it at all behind the TV stand now, woohoo!  Speaking of TV stands, I have plans... but they're for another day.

• Curtain making.

When our living room was painted brown my mum made these wonderful coordinating curtains for us, but now that the room is painted blue the curtains were too dark.  So they're being moved to the spare room (which will be cream/white so they'll go perfectly) and I've been making new pale cream curtains for the living room.  They're almost done, just one hem to go, so now we see this:

It feels much brighter in here now, and although you can't see it on camera, they do have a subtle texture that catches the sunlight (when we get some!!).

• Toilet Storage

Our toilet is in a separate room to our bathroom.  I would much prefer it to be just one big room, but that involves knocking walls down, which would just be too much expense and hassle for little or no added value, so we have to make do.  I've painted the toilet room and we're about to start on the bathroom, but in the meantime I asked Kevin to make a little shelf to go over the door in the toilet to store our toilet paper out of sight.  We got a free piece of wood from Homebase which Kevin cut to size, I painted white and Kevin hung and filled with rolls and rolls of toilet paper.  Ta dah!

I love it so much already.  You don't notice it when you're in there at all, but it means never having to shout for each other when we've forgotten to put an extra roll in the toilet room.  It's the little things!

• Plants

Our plants are still alive and blooming!  We've killed our fair share of aphids, and only one plant this year.  Look how pretty:

I'm so proud of not killing these plants!  Maybe we'll try some veg again next year...

• Kitchen Shelves

We have needed some extra kitchen storage for sooo long.  Seriously, half of the kitchen equipment was in the utility room and half on the kitchen floor.  So we took a little trip to Ikea, originally to look at these Grundtal shelves, but while we were there we found these beauties instead.  So we've gone from bare wall to full shelves, huzzah!

• In progress:

I'm just about to start painting our front hall to match the living room.  It has a dado rail and leads into the white utility room, the white kitchen, and the blue/cream living room, so I thought painting it in the living room colour scheme was a safe bet.  It's currently white on top of the dado, and a bright apple green underneath.  Here's a before shot, and there'll be some after pics up soon, I promise!

Slam dunk the junk!

Well here's another post with updates to a busy DIY schedule.

Let's just say it's slacking. I've been busy with several 'projects' over the past couple of weeks, most of them are really important to the layout and 'one-ness-esses' of the flat. Here is a prime example of the arduous labour I have been exposed to:

That my friend, is a blanking plate that is covering a hole in the kitchen ceiling where the light used to be. I was looking at it and I just had to put the little bugger out of its misery. I did what any normal person would have done and bought a new one scraped it clean to its former rusty looking glory. OH C'MON! It's the scrape king (tightwad) here, what did you expect?!

Yes Cinderella, you shall go to the ball. Well I spruced it up a little bit with some white spray paint (forgot to take a picture of that) and then slotted it back into the ceiling and applied some filler around the edges and voila! The key factor to the kitchen is complete!

So here is the before and after picture

I suppose it would have looked better if I took a closer picture. But I'm sure you get the gist.


Another major project that emerged, from the cold weather we had many many weeks ago, was the cold air infiltrating our WARM fortress.

It was coming from nearly every room. So I cast aside my other DIY and focused on this just so it reduced the energy bill. There was a chill coming from the utility room, bathroom, spare room, bedroom and the living room.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand in the blue corner, Tag Team Champions: The Cold Crew!

Aaaaaaaaaaaand in the red corner, the newcomers: The Foam Fighters!

To cut to the chase, Biff! Baff! Boff!, the foam won.

Then it hit me after all the cold weather had gone and the sunshine started to roll in through the window. It ain't half hot in here. It seems I just clogged up the supply of cool air flowing through. Oh well, better open these clear doors attached to the side of the flat.


The last thing we've done recently is to clear the junk spare room of anything we didn't need. It was an epic journey to the tip. Cardboard, crap, clutter and cots of caint... err Pots of Paint!!

So it went from looking like a crapstorm had thrown a party in the room:

To something that looked like a crapstorm had a fleeting visit. Hi! Bye!:

Believe it or not, there is a system working here. I'll let you know what it is when I receive the memo....

Scrape and Pillage

Someone nominate me for the 'Most-scraping-with-a-snap-off-blade' of the year awards.

Whilst Ellen has been busy painting, I've been doing the opposite. And I don't mean rolling paint off the walls into paint tins.  SCRAPING~@!

It first started with the 'boiler room' (can't think of what else to call it as it only has the boiler in, so the title seems fitting for now) walls as the paint was flaking. 

I also started this before when we first had the new boiler installed, you can probably tell from the patchy bits of white plaster.

So one Saturday night I put on the mp3 player and went to town on this for hours on end. There's some simple pleasures in life and I must say, scraping off GINORMOUS patches of paint in one go must be up the top of the list.  The little bits, well they're not worth the time or effort.

Nevertheless, I've been in that cupboard on several occasions now using my trusty blades and taking off the paint.  As a bonus I managed to take off some of the plaster as well. This is a photo prior to the 'oops I've made a hole in the plasterwork' moment.  I suppose it's another job for me to do at a later date, and I'm sure it'll be blogged about. Something along the lines of -  'Hey, look at me. I've filled in the mess I made!'

Here's the finished article. Doesn't really look that different from the first photo.  But as you can see there is a hole in the plasterwork on the left which looks like a key?? and the rest of the top needs to be scraped off.  This is all small little chippy pieces of paint and so I'll have to get fired up on Lucozade to actually have the energy to finish it off.


It's not only walls that I've been scraping.  There have been several doors in the mix too. I've pretty much scraped all the doors we've got back to wood as the previous owners' paintwork was sloppy and you could see the paint drips.  Well the other day (or maybe week) we received free doors from our neighbour that match all our other doors except the ones in the living room. Being the man I am,  I'm stripping them down for Ellen to repaint.  Off comes the white paint, on goes some white paint!

This is actually the 2nd door to be stripped, I've already done the first but only thought of taking a before and after photo when I was nearly finished.  So I started fresh on this one.  Not liking the white paint (and the strange smell it gives off) I stripped it down to it's true form...

And geeeeeeees Louise, it stinks worse than it did when it was painted.  You can certainly taste it that's for sure.  It was like having a 3 course meal.  Starter - Varnish nibbles.  Main - Varnish à la mode. Dessert - Double Varnish sundae.

I must have gorged on those nibbles as my fingers reeked.  No matter how many times I washed my hands, there was still a little trace of varnish lingering.

And this is the aftermath of one door scraping.  The paint tray is pretty deep so that's a lot of paint (this includes the other side of the door too) and most of it is on the floor.  I must say, I do like to discover what's underneath the plain white.  In this case it was 'awesome green'. I'm sure that's what it must have said on the paint tin in the shop when it was bought.. In the 1940's!  Ha Ha!

The underbelly of the other door was a 'nice' red colour, probably from the same paint range.  Camo green and blood red, what must their living room have looked like..??



If only it was yellow instead of green I could have look like a giant Rhubarb and Custard sweet.

And then here I would be, blogging about licking the paint off the walls instead of scraping them.