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.

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.