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!

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!

Let's Go Outside...

In honour of the sun coming out and actually staying out for more than a couple of hours we've been making our outside area as pretty as possible.  We already have our plants, and our first flower, but we wanted to make the space more inviting, seeing as we'll be spending a lot of time out there now summer's begun.

The first flower of summer, ain't she purty!

We had ummed and ahhed over what to do about the concrete floor since we bought the flat.  It's nothing horrific to live with, but it does have a weird large paint stain that's sort of indented into the concrete (no idea how it happened) so it's a wee bit unsightly.

 My feet are totally there for size reference, 

not because I can't take photos properly.  Honest.

Our first thought was Astroturf; my parents had it in their back garden when I was very little, and our upstairs neighbour actually has it on his balcony now and it looks pretty cool.  We had looked into it a few years ago, but it was too expensive for what we wanted to pay back then, and despite hunting on ebay for a few weeks we couldn't find any cheap offcuts that would fit our quite large balcony (it's 4.25m by 1.15m (14' by 3'9" in old money).

At our recent trip to the garden centre we had seen samples of Astroturf, but we decided the one that we liked (i.e. the cheapest one that didn't just look like shredded green plastic bags) was still too expensive at around £25 per square metre (we'd need at least 5 square metres, and it would probably have joins  somewhere due to the long, thin shape of our balcony).

Then, a few weeks ago I saw a picture on Pinterest of Platta flooring tiles from Ikea, and fell in love.  I spoke to Kevin about it and he loved the flooring too, but when we I did some calculations on how much it would cost we I worked it out to be around £280, far too much for us to pay.

 Pic from ikea.com

The only other option that we could think of was to paint the floor dark green and hope that that would make it look at least a bit nicer than the concrete, but Kevin really wasn't keen on the idea, and after mulling it over he decided that we should spend the money and get the Platta flooring, seeing as when we move we can just take it with us and reuse it.

So we did some more calculations, and learnt a very important lesson: always do your calculations at least twice, especially if you're us me.  It turned out our my original calculations were far from correct and that we'd actually only need 5 or 6 packs at £16.99 to cover the whole balcony.  Huzzah!  So yesterday we zoomed off to Ikea and picked up 5 packets, which we laid yesterday afternoon.  It took us around an hour and half, and an hour of that was sweeping the balcony and moving the plants and potting shelves around, with another 20 minutes cutting some of the tiles to fit.  All in all, the actual laying the tiles only took around 10 minutes!  We had to go back today for an extra pack to finish off the edges, but that only took another 10 minutes of cutting tiles when we got back.

The flooring tiles look like this on top:

and like this underneath:

and just clip together like this:

Can you see where the little pegs just fit in the holes?  It's as easy as that.

Our balcony is exactly 3 1/2 tiles wide so we had to cut some tiles in half and snip some of the joining pieces off the edges for a snug fit.  It says on the instructions to use a saw to cut the tiles, but I tried a pair of secateurs to snip through the plastic and they worked perfectly, so we just did them that way.

Anyway, without further ado, here are some before and after shots of the balcony:

Can you tell we haven't been out there for a while?!

Ta-daaaaah!

Those are the outdoor cushions with the covers that I made from the same fabric I made my tote bag with (I made them about a month ago but the weather went bad so we haven't used them outside until now).

That's a little close up of our 'gardening area', all  nice and tidy and spider-free now, thanks to Kevin <3.  Our little bee house is out there, but we still have no takers.  Maybe our super sophisticated new flooring will attract some posh bees...

It's so nice out there now.  The floor makes such a huge difference, and looks way more expensive than it actually is (it cost a total of £101.94), and we can take it with us when we go!  It also needs very little maintenance, just oiling twice a year, which we do with our coffee table and chopping board anyway so it's just an extra thing to add to that list, and it should be quite enjoyable to do on a nice day outside.  It also has the added bonus that we can move it if we need to do any particularly messy jobs outside, such as sanding or spray painting.  All in all I think we've found our perfect floor (can you tell how much we love it?!).

We've been doing lots of other little bits and pieces (and a couple of big bits and pieces) of DIY, some of which should be finished very soon, so we'll have some more updates in a few days (I think I always say that and then don't update for weeks, but I really mean it this time!).  But right now I'm off to bed so I can wake up extra early and have breakfast outside, woo!

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"

The Plants, the Bag and the Wardrobe (not necessarily in that order)

On Tuesday it finally stopped showering for long enough for me to plant up the rest of our new plants, and today I've finally stopped procrastinating for long enough to actually write a post about it.

It took a lot less time than I expected, primarily because I didn't actually have to replant the lavender or the pieris, as the plastic pots they were in fitted perfectly into the decorative pots we already had, so that took all of five minutes.  I did plant the sweet peas in a new pot, complete with trellis jammed in the back for them to climb up.  I've put them all together in one large plant pot, I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not, but I can always move some of them to another pot if it gets too crowded.  Anyway, without further ado, les plants:

Sorry for the close-up-ness of the picture, our balcony's only just over a metre wide so it's the best I could manage.

Progress on the wardrobe is slooooow, mostly due to me.  I thought I was being really clever in painting the back of the doors first so that the front wouldn't be subject to drips coming through when I painted the back.  Except while I was painting the back first, I wasn't checking for drips on the front.  Cue a tonne of drips.  So many I nearly wept, but instead I thought maybe painting over them might make them less obvious.

Long story short, it didn't, so yesterday morning I first tried sanding them down and then when that didn't work I got Kevin's amazing razor scraper and scraped them all off.   Luckily repainting over the bare patches where drips used to be looks way less obvious than the drips did, but it's taken a long time (waiting for coats to dry properly so I don't mess it up again) and I'm a couple of days behind on my plan.  Oh well, I foresee a lot of sanding and painting in the spare room this weekend, and perhaps sometime next week a white wardrobe?  I really hope so!

I also did a little bit of sewing this week, made myself a nice new tote bag using this pattern, from some on sale, super cheap Ikea bed linen (not actual linen, poly cotton, but still).  So that's another thing from my Things to Make and Do board that I've done.  That's two in one week!  Woo!

I'm going to use the rest of the fabric to make some covers for our enormous outdoor cushions, and we're going to Ikea this weekend (Kevin doesn't know this yet, I bet it makes his day, haha) to look at some possible decking for the balcony floor.  All we'll need then is for summer to arrive, and hopefully last longer than two weeks!

I Like My Women Like I Like My Coffee... Covered In Bees!

Now that summer is nearly here we've decided to go gardening crazy!  If only we had a garden *sigh*.  We do have our balcony though, on which many a plant has succumbed to lack of watering / aphids that just won't die.  We were out enjoying the sun a couple of weeks ago (remember that sun... where did it go?) when a lovely fat bumble bee came to visit us.  It was love at first sight for Kevin, who now wants as many as possible to come and enjoy our balcony with us.

To say I'm not very good with plants would be a huge understatement.  Everything that's been out on our balcony has died, and at the moment we have four houseplants, two of which are succulents, and they're only all alive because they're indoors so we notice when they need watering.  So whenever I get all excited and suggest to Kevin that we should get loads of pretty flowers for our balcony he just flat out refuses, which is probably a good thing.  However, now he's all excited about bees, he's the one doing the suggesting, and I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth, so on Saturday we spent a couple of hours at our local garden centre looking for some bee friendly plants.

We'd done some highly scientific research beforehand into what would attract bees (i.e. looked on the internet a bit and asked my mum, thanks Mum!) and apparently they like blue flowers, because they can mainly see colours at the blue end of the spectrum.

Anyway, after about an hour-and-a-half wandering around the plant section we came home with these beauties:

• 10 trailing light blue Lobelias
• 6 F1 blue Petunias
• 1 blue Scabiosa
• 1 white and pink Campanula
• 1 purple Sweet Pea
• 1 pink Sweet Pea
• 1 Pieris (forest flame)

The garden centre had very helpfully put some 'Bee Friendly' stickers on some of the plants, and the others we bought because we saw bees landing on them while we were there.

I am madly in love with the Forest Flame (the tall one at the back with the pink leaves).  It's my new favourite thing in the whole flat, so I'm gonna be uber-careful not to kill it!

I planted half of the plants today in two lots of tiered planters.  Space is at a premium on our balcony, so when I saw the idea of making your own tiered planters on this website I pinned it on my things to make and do board, and it's the first thing on there that I've actually done (woo, go me! haha).

I still have the sweet peas and the pieris to plant up tomorrow, along with a gorgeous lavender plant that my mum got us (thanks again Mum!), but without further ado, our new tiered planters:

Bee's-Eye View

The lobelias are in the bottom tier, petunias in the middle and then the scabiosa and campanula in each top pot.  The lobelias are trailing, so hopefully they'll spread out and down over the pot, I'm really excited to see what they look like when the plants are blooming.

I shall post pics of the rest of the plants tomorrow when they're all nicely potted up and I've swept the balcony a bit (compost gets everywhere), and hopefully, possibly, maybe, by the end of this week there may be a white wardrobe in the spare room.  Maybe.