PORTFOLIO

This progress post involves a lot of taking down wallpaper and finding many, many cracks but it’s all part of the journey. As I’ve been doing most of the work by myself so far I haven’t been able to do a lot of the big jobs that need doing, which has made it feel like I’ve not been doing much. I’ve included some pictures I have taken on my phone for context and I will take some more with the camera when I do a big clear up and get organised in there. I have also had some company whilst renovating, Buddy the Labrador has greatly enjoyed snoozing on the window sills after running off with my gloves and goggles.

I decided to take down the wallpaper in every room to see what the walls were like and if the plaster would need to come off, and for the most part, the walls just need a bit of filling and sanding down to be ready for painting. Taking the wallpaper down was a long and tedious job but it needed doing and has helped me see a clearer vision for what I want the house to look like. Most of the carpets are now up as well and the floorboards are almost perfect with just a few cuts in them were radiators and electrics have been fitted. A few boards might have to come up when we add more plug sockets but we luckily don’t have to replace a full room of floor boards. The hallway is the only place where we are considering leaving the floor boards on show.

Woodchip wallpaper is a pain. And in this house it’s everywhere, including every wall and the ceiling in the third bedroom. This is the smallest room in the house and I think it might just have the most amount of cracks in it. This room is going to have to have those cracks checked and be re-plastered, but from what we can see the cracks are just from the house settling over the years and aren’t anything to worry about. When I took the carpet up in here I found a lot of old newspaper pages underneath from the 60s which are proving difficult to peel off but its interesting to see what was happening in the local area back then. I would imagine this room could be an office or a bedroom, with a single bed in, but either way we need to add some plug sockets as they aren’t any in here at the moment.

Now onto some big changes that have been happening recently. My grandad has been up for a couple fo days and helped me take out the fireplaces up stairs and get the chimney breasts ready for plastering. The pink room is the second bedroom and it is big, but the fireplace was taking up a lot of room, and taking out the chimney breast would be a long and expensive job for us to do, so we decided to remove the fireplace but keep the hole where it was so it can be a feature of the room or be used for storage. A lot of this room is going to have the plaster taken off the walls and be redone as again there are some pretty big cracks in the walls.

Removing the fireplace in the master bedroom was very messy but I did find a very old match box in pretty good condition until our dog found it and tore it to pieces. I decided to keep the hole where the fireplace was and also the arch of the bricks in, just to make it a bit more interesting than having another plain wall in here. As this is the master bedroom I have thought about tiling inside the fireplace and adding a fire surround so it can be a bit grander than the other rooms. There are a few structural things that need sorting out in this room including taking out the window and re-laying the bricks it sits on, as they appear to be dropping to one side. After that’s done the new windows can go in so it should finally feel a bit warmer in this room. This is one of my favourite rooms in the house because of the sunlight that beams into it in the morning and I can’t wait for it to be finished because I think it will look amazing in here.

I’m hoping to be getting some more help with the house shortly so I can get the other two fireplaces out, the bathroom stripped back and the kitchen taken out. For now I have to keep telling myself it’s going to look worse before it looks better, to reassure myself it will turn out good in the end. On my next posts about the house I will start focusing on just one room and show the plans and designs I have come up with to give a an idea of what it should look like.