Happy 2013!

To celebrate, we've decided to return to blogging!  Also, we actually got off our arses and have stuff to blog about!  Only one of those statements is true!  And now I have to stop putting exclamation marks at the end of my sentences!  Or not!  Haha!  Okay, enough now really.

So, I have a multitude of things to update you about, but I don't think there are any that are amazingly spectacular, so don't get too excited.  I misled  you with all the exclamation marks, didn't I?  Sorry.

Anywho...  here is a list of things we've been doing:

• The living room mantelpiece has been put back together and screwed back to the wall, but no pics yet because we haven't hung the mirror.  There'll be a post coming shortly.  Here's a nice before shot for you though:
  
  
  
  
  

  The cardboard was taped to the brick to keep the draught out while we built a nice wooden insert to do that job permanently.  

• The hall has been painted, but I don't have any pictures of it newly done yet, so there may be a post about that in a week or so;

• The bathroom and toilet have been painted, panelled and prettified and are almost finished apart from the missing doors (bathroom cupboard and toilet), which are likely to be missing for a little while longer, so that's another future post.  Here are a couple of before pics for you to see what we were dealing with (warning, they're not pretty!):
  
  
  
  
  This is where the sink goes... I like that it looks like some kind of alien trying to break through with his little wavy arms.
  
  
  
  
  

  This is the toilet, obviously, with its beautifully stained/painted concrete floor.  I bet this went well with the dark purple walls and bright green door that we found underneath layers of paint.  Ahem.
  
  

  

  
  No, this is not carpet in the bathroom, this is coving in the living room.  To go in the bathroom.  Which it did.  And you will see photos that prove this.  Eventually.

  
  

• Kevin has bought a nice shiny plane to use on various doors to make them fit, but still has yet to use it due to lack of space, which will be solved once we finish the spare room.  I'm sure once he's used it he'll want to tell you all about it.  I'm very sorry, but I don't have a picture of the plane (I know you're just dying to see it) and I'm not about to go searching for it in the disorganisation that is our spare room.  It's very pretty, you'll just have to take my word for it.
  

• Way back in the summertime, when the weather was fine, Kevin screwed this lovely piece of trellis to our balcony wall.  There is currently a passion flower growing all over it (thanks Kevin's dad!) and so far it has survived all that winter has had to throw at it.  Except that this week we're half a foot deep in snow, and now that I've jinxed it it definitely won't make it, but still, 6 months is a looooong time for a plant in this place! 
  
  Here's a mildly amusing story; when we bought the trellis we forgot that we only have a tiny little car and struggle to fit anything larger than a couple of shopping bags in it at a time.  So we bought the (fairly large) trellis, and then had to ring my uber-generous mum to come and get it from us in the Homebase car park and drive it all the way to our flat in her not so tiny car.  I hope you think it was worth it Mum, you've helped us keep a plant alive!
  
  

• The spare room is a lot clearer and will be painted this week(!) so expect that post in a couple of years days, but until then, here's a before picture from ages ago.  It was even worse when we decided to clear it out.
  
  
  
  
  This is the before pic, obviously.
  
  
  
  
  And this is the what it looks like after moving a shedload of stuff to the shed (haha) and driving three car loads to the tip.  Still not amazing, but waaaaaay better than before, and only full of stuff we need now!  Soon to have my old bed in it.  (I promise Mum and Dad, we will get it from you in the next two weeks.  Your six years of waiting is finally over!!!!)
  
  And now, for your viewing pleasure, the AMAZING colour that the former owners decided would look good in a bedroom.  I have to add this wasn't a child's bedroom, and to top it off, the paint is insanely shiny.  It's migraine inducing, I swear.  Also, note how they didn't bother to do anything about the clashing former wallpaper behind the radiator, so this is the view when you walk into the room.  Stunning.  It's gone now though; as soon as the room was clear enough two coats of white paint went over that hideousness, and we're off out tomorrow, weather permitting, to pick up the new paint colour, woo!
  
  

So that's seven months' worth of work, which really doesn't seem to amount to much when you put it all in one blog post.  Best get back to it, I suppose!

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!

If At First You Don't Succeed.... You Suck!

Once again it's my time to make a post. I wouldn't want it to become Ellen & Ellen's DIY Blog now would I. Or would I??

Oddjobs are at it again, I've had so many projects it's unbelievable. Firstly there's the 'Play console games' project, then 'Do nothing' project and somewhere around 19th place is the 'Do DIY!' project.

One particular project I didn't have any success with (I Suck!) was the 'Super Secret' project I had kept from Ellen. Part of her folding chair broke, so I decided to craft some new parts out of wood. Needless to say I didn't have the same tools and it all went horribly wrong. The plus side is that there's now more chunks of firewood available... That was true intention the whole time. Lesson 1 : Bodj Bodj job = Useful material!

The next project was the 'cover-the-horrible-wall-in-the-front-room-corner-with-plaster' project! Granted there are more horriribler walls to choose from but I chose the easiest one. So it went from looking like this:

Urgh, put it away!! My eyes... They be bleedin' !!! 

To this :

 Easy pleasy on the eyes!

To be honest I've no idea why Ellen was scribbling on it with a big white piece of chalk. (What?! She used sanding paper... ON MY WORK?!)  She also prepared the wall's face for a nice splash of makeup. So it went from looking like crap. To looking like the colour of crap. To blue.

 Oh telephone wall socket, you are so shy!

The next thing for me to do in the living room is to make a cover for the hideous gas meter.  Granted there are more hideodously meters to choose from but I chose the easiest only one we've got.

Urgh, cover it up.  My eyes... they just be recovering... now they be burnin' !

I'm about half way through this project so I will be completed in the next few days. Ellen can then paint it and the gasman can struggle the next time he comes to read the meter.  

"Uhhh what meter??  Care for a cup of tea Mr Gasman? I'll ummm just put the kettle on... on... the floor. 'Cause we won't be needing that, because we don't use gas"

Oops...

Okay, I guess this is working motivation wise, just we're more motivated with the DIY than with recording it, so we now have an even more 'in progress' living room and a camera full of photos waiting to be put up here. So I'm finally getting round to it, although it's entirely possible that after this post there won't be another one for another month, but hey, as long as we're DIY-ing then it's all good!

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!

Motivation?

Okay, so apparently a good way to keep motivated is to keep a record of your achievements to look back on.  Seeing as we've been doing up our flat for the last almost 5 years and so far have a grand total of two rooms completed I thought it would be worth a shot.  So from now on I'm (we're) going to record all the little bits of DIY that we actually get done around here (with the help of my lovely new camera, thanks Kevin!) in the hope that it'll spur us on.  So without further ado, the first thing I'm going to post about is painting the living room.  One wall down, three walls (and a bit of a doorway wall) to go!

Not so sexy before colours:

Slightly sexier and a lot lighter and brighter and altogether nicer after colours:

So obviously, once I've pressed publish and re-read this post I shall be totally inspired to begin filling, sanding and painting the other three walls (and a doorway).  We shall see.