What a difference 5 days makes

This week, Graham came round to do our floors. He was an absolutely lovely man with an obvious passion for his work, and I can't recommend him highly enough

Having said that, I have found the whole process a bit stressful. I am not great with dealing with setbacks, and this project was full of setbacks. Day 1, Gray's car broke down, so he couldn't bring the sanding equipment. He brought all the filler he could carry, but it only covered 3/4 of the living room. Day 2 was all fine but day 3 brought a complaint from the downstairs neighbour and day 4 I learned that downstairs neighbour works shifts and sleeps during the day, so sanding upstairs was not ideal. He was pretty angry. I grovelled. Then I paid for him to go to a hotel for the day which thankfully seemed to keep him happy.

Because I thought G would only be working a maximum of 4 days, I only got a permit until Thursday, so yesterday frantically called the council to get it extended. They agreed, but didn't deliver it. G had to go round first thing this morning to pick it up. I was so so nervous that everything wasn't going to be finished by the weekend. We have been living in a building site this week, with most of our possessions piled up either in the hallway or the kitchen. Accessing the fridge and stove (and washing machine and sink) was pretty much impossible. Even making a cup of tea was a bit of a palava.



But now it is done. And how! It looks amazing. I can't believe this is the same floor. I can't believe this is the same flat! The colour on the floor is light and bright and it makes the whole flat feel brighter. We had planned to carpet the hallway, but after seeing what a difference the sanding can make, we might have to get the wood just treated in there as well. It'll be a heck of a lot easier without having to shift all the furniture around...

Painting

Because we are generally crap, I realised that the painting in our flat was Never Going to Finish. So I hired the cousin of a friend who is temporarily out of work to come and paint. Hoorah! And it looks great. He did the final coats in the bedroom (it needed TWO MORE. That means it needed FIVE COATS OF PAINT to cover up the faux Roman stucco effect lovely Nige had left us), painted the skirting boards and sanded/painted the door frames. Yay! Lovin' it.

Two weeks until the floor man comes.

Update

So, a lack of updating shows that we are clearly not doing a damn thing on the flat. Which is a shame because there is still a lot that needs doing. SO I am making a bold statement here, but I think I would like to be finished by the end of the year. Our fixed rate mortgage comes to an end, and we'll be on a lower interest rate from January, so if we finish it, then we are free to either sell it and move on, or rent it out on the lower interest rates, or stay and enjoy it. Either way, it has to move on.

So, today I have had someone round to give us a quote on doing up the floorboards. The price was pretty reasonable, so I think I'm going to get him in. I have hired a friend's cousin to come round and finish off all the sanding and painting of skirting boards and the last bits of painting on the walls, and once that's done, I can get someone in to do the carpet in the hallway. There is then work to be done in the kitchen and bathroom, but although we had grand plans for amazing shower units and a new kitchen, realistically I think for now we will keep this work to a minimum.

There. I have posted it. If, in three months time, I post again and say that we still haven't done anything, then that will be very sad, but not that unlikely. SO much work, so little time, and so little motivation!

I see you!

A couple of weeks ago I bought a big mirror from the salvage yard in Vauxhall. It was reclaimed from Selfridges when they did the place up a while back, and while it was lovely and large and (fairly) cheap, the colours are pretty garish. SO today I had some fun painting it black. It needs one more coat, but looks pretty good already! If only the boyfriend would allow me to operate a drill, I could put it up on the wall this week...

An update

We haven't posted a lot lately, and yes, we are still incredibly lazy and taking our sweet time with everything. BUT! That's not to say that we haven't been doing things. We have, really.

We have had the carpet man round for measuring and quoting.
Sisal (left) vs. Seagrass (right). We're leaning towards Seagrass at the minute, but can't do anything until we've painted the skirting boards.

We have started composting as part of our drive to only have one Tesco bin bag worth of rubbish each week:

I wanted to try my hand at composting, and the Bokashi bin system has been highly recommended. Once the compost is ready (it takes around 2 weeks), I'll be transporting it to the work balcony gardens. The bins also produce a liquid apparently, which is good for feeding plants, so I'll be using that instead of baby bio.
Our first round of vegetable peelings goes in the new composting bin.

We've been deep-cleaning:

We finally bought a proper hoover (instead of the crappy dustbuster that hasn't worked well for years). Yesterday we started on the disgusting, but necessary, project of digging all the dust out from between the floorboards. We did 1/3 of the living room yesterday evening, which produced around 1/3 of a Tesco bag full of dust. YUCK!

I've been growing plants:

And framing some Chinese art:

I picked this up in Guangzhou as a slightly less touristy than usual gift for Steph.

Ridiculously, this frame came in this box:

More pics and posts to come soon.

Painting

The living room and hallway are so close to being finished I can taste it. In the living room, just a stubborn blue patch remains. We discovered a whole load more wallpaper that needed to come off before we could start on the final part, but now we are so almost there. In the hallway, the undercoat is finished, and we just have around 1/2 of the overcoat remaining. Next weekend we might actually be able to move on to the bedroom, which we painted when we first moved, but in a shade of white that we are no longer happy with.

Before:
After:

Organising

I've spent quite a number of hours this morning on the Real Simple website and Lakeland. I am now £50 poorer and determined to get more organised. I'm getting a shelf to lift my cookbooks onto and a plate shelf so that I can stop almost breaking things whenever I try to get plates down. Also on the list: tongs, a moisture remover for the bathroom, a handheld shredder, a sink tidy, and a plastic bag dispenser, as the IKEA thing isn't working out so well.

But for today, I started simply by sorting through some plastic tubs and am now trying to get rid of a whole load more things on Freecycle. I'm getting rid of:

3x trainers
1x boots
1x wellies
2x shot glasses
3x wooden bowls
1x beach towel
1x large plastic tub

I also have one huge CD wallet full of CDs and a smaller wallet half full, but I think I'll try to sell that on Ebay, since the wallets on their own go for a tenner. I have some other Ebayable items, so I might have to get on that next.

But first! I finally hung up the hook that "Santa" got me from India. Yay! It looks great. I did try to hang a second hook in the kitchen, but I was up on a ladder, and I have no drill and I dropped the screw and it all went a bit wrong. So that might have to wait for another day...

Freecycle

I can't tell you how much I love my local Freecycle group. I just got rid of all of the cardboard stuffing from the shower box. This means that I can fold the box into a size that the recycling team will actually agree to collect! Hooray. Plus the people are generally lovely and quite funny and have all sorts of interesting reasons for needing my miscellaneous crap. Just fantastic.

Shower: The update

I had a hot shower this morning. As lovely as the bucket bath is, nothing beats a warm shower first thing in the day...

Triton t80si pumped

So, last weekend, our shower died. Well, we think it died. We couldn't see anything too wrong with it, but there was no more hot water. Rather than spend £50 on a plumber and £100 on parts, we just decided fek it. Our shower is mank - who knows how many years it was in the bathroom before we moved in. So we decided to buy a new one.

And because apparently only a very small number of shower models do both the heating and the pumping of water, we were fairly limited in our selection. And because we are scared of drilling, we opted for the easiest choice: a brand new version of exactly the same shower. Genius.

The boyfriend ordered the shower from Plumbworld, and didn't want to open the box at work in case all sorts of miscellaneous bits spilled out. "But I'm not really sure how I'm going to get it home," he said this evening when he rang after work, "because it's almost as big as me." He did manage to navigate it home on the buses, and this is what we found inside:


The weight was split 50/50 between shower and shredded cardboard packaging. I guess Plumbworld are reeeeally worried about damage in the post.

Anyway, we read the instructions, we tested the old shower *just* to make sure that we weren't just being silly, and then we took the old one down and put the new one up. The holes were in the same place on the wall, we'd already taken one apart, so we knew how to put the new one together. It was super easy.

Too easy. As of tonight, the shower is working and is lovely and hot, but will it last!? I don't want to count my chickens just yet. It all seems to good to be true... only tomorrow's shower will tell...

Just because there hasn't been much updating lately...

We had some friends round for lunch this afternoon. The place is starting to look quite nice from time to time.

More white walls

Freecycle

Freecycle is such a brilliant thing. Tonight, a lovely man came round and collected the massive piece of wood we've been keeping lying around since we moved in. It was once part of the "bunk bed". Who knows what they are going to use it for, but it was quite a good piece of wood, so glad it could go to a good home...

Ow

Finally we had a day of DIY. Oh but the pain. My thumbs hurt, my back is aching, my wrists feel funny... I am going to sleep extremely well tonight. BUT we did get some stuff done. I built a non-children sized chest of drawers (OMG no more folding underwear to make it fit!) and Steph painted a couple of the walls in the "blue room". Then we moved all of the clothing-related things (cupboards, clothes, shoes, etc) into the bedroom. The living room now looks about 10 times bigger, hurrah! Still loads to sort out though... a task for later on (or maybe tomorrow)(or maybe next week). Pics below.

Upgrade!

Prettier laundry basket!


Stronger magnets!


Better plastic bag management!

Oh the excitement as one afternoon's shopping on Ebay gradually makes its way to me in the post.

New things

Some of the exciting new purchases for the flat include:


Picture hooks and bookends!


A new computer! Still a work in progress (especially its positioning...)


Lightbulbs!

Whilst in Sweden over the weekend we also purchased coat hooks! These will be on the wall once the wall is painted, so it may be some time before you see these. £55 for that Dwell coat stand was too much. But if you have already bought it, don't fret. It will still find a handsome spot in our living room.

A new IKEA chest of drawers should be arriving soon and the entire living room will change as a result. Pics soon to follow.

If you fancy buying us an early Xmas present

I have my eye on this. I think I am going to get it. It's the best metal coat stand I've found aside from some from Heal's which cost 10x as much (literally - £445). If anyone fancies getting it for us as a very delayed house warming gift, we wouldn't say no...

Update...

So, it's been QUITE a while since we last updated the blog. This is primarily because we have done ZERO DIY. Seriously. THe hallway is still only half painted... we are thinking of getting a decorator in to finish it. We'll see.

But anyway, there have been a few purchases/gifts that have added to the flat, so I took some snaps today, and here they are.

Last time we had the sofa, for ages we had sofa cushion covers but no cushions, now we have a sofa, sofa cushion covers AND sofa cushions. It is pretty spectacular.

We have had this lamp for ages, but I can't figure out for the life of me what kind of lightbulbs actually go into it. So for the minute it looks pretty, but doesn't actually work.

Got this little iPod player last weekend. It is brilliant. Not only does my iPod fit neatly into it, the player also charges the iPod. And there is a remote control for it. And it also has a radio. And it displays the temperature. And it is pretty loud. This is the best spontaneous purchase I have made in a very long time (apart, of course, from the iPod itself).

This is just to display how empty the top of the fridge now looks. Before it was all two terrible but huge speakers and cables and crap for me to plug some music into. Much improved.

Next up:
Steph has ordered a new computer which will be in the lounge, so we need to get some kind of table for that. I have just ordered a new (large) chest of drawers to replace our tiny child-sized ones from Argos. Once those are in place, the closets will move into the bedroom and the tiny chest of drawers will be come hallway drawers full of exciting things like gloves and electrical plugs. It's all go now!

SOFA SOFA SOFA

That's exciting stuff. We have two rooms! The boyfriend is still sleeping so I am in the living room on the sofa so I don't wake him up. WOW!!! This is revolutionary stuff. And it has flag arms for resting things on, and it is firm and non-squishy, and it has a sofa bed, and it is the colour we wanted. And it was incredibly cheap. I think it might be perfect. Thanks to Rob for putting it together. And for knowing that the type of carpet we want is called "Seagrass". That will definitely come in handy.

Recycling my university degrees

Yesterday and today I went through 4 years of folders of notes and put them all in the recycling bin. It was surprisingly emotional. But it needs to go. I never refer to them and I have all of my notes from my masters on my PC anyway. I was so organised - all of my notes are types up! But throwing it all away was still so sad... 8 A4 ring binders full of plastic folders and paper, all gone. 4 years and 2 degrees! Trashed because they are just cluttering up the flat. Sad days.