Bee-n busy

Hello lovelies,

Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth for a few days. Been poorly with the usual Autumn/winter bugs. But I'm back and raring to go.
 Quick Refresher - Here is where we are up to.

BEFORE:

So FAR:

So the floor - ah the floor. A mammoth decision in a project like this and it took as ages to get it sorted. We wanted a wooden floor for the living room. We plan on having children and we already have 2 cats so durable was essential - as was easy cleaning. We are also in a flood zone and the property flooded 3 years ago in the big floods so we wanted a floor that would be able to survive some water if required.

Ideally we wanted hard wood or engineered wood. But its a big room and we are pretty fussy when it comes to colours. So we really wanted this :

Natural 20mm Oak Ironbark Treasures Engineered Oak Wood Flooring 

Lovely wide boards and a country cottage creamy colour. But alas at £33 per M² it was never going to fit our budget, the living room and hallway together are 40M².

We decided to try and use the existing solid pine boards from the room above ( a full size loft). The plan is to convert it in to a master bedroom suite but we have already decided that we would like carpet up there. Those original boards would be wasted.

I haven't shown you upstairs yet - so quick layout. Marked in red is the door that my dad knocked through in to the loft.

As you can see - converting the loft will double the size of the upstairs. Plus we have "Loft" above the study, bedroom one and two and the bathrooms too.

I'll show you all what we plan to do with the upstairs another time. For now welcome to our loft Master bedroom to be.

Easily my favourite room in the house - bursting with potential (and Cobwebs). The ceiling will be left vaulted and some sky lights will go in to let in more light.

Things to note:
Original Granary winch in fully working order next to the original granary doors
The super polite graffiti spray painted on the walls "hello pretty" and "Good Evening" being my favourites

So the loft is going to be a fun project. But for now its the floor we are after. The boards show a lot of wear and tear (as you would expect after 130 years!) but some portions were in really good nic.

Once we had cleared the loft (most of it already cleared in the pictures above) we inspected the floor. We knew that as the loft room was the same size as the living room and hallway below that should have been enough floor. However there was a large section missing where the stairs came up as well as a granary loft hatch that has been filled and some cut outs from where the RSJs for the living room were hoisted. We decided just to floor the living room. That also took the pressure off in terms of damaging the boards while lifting,

Some boards were fine -

Some areas were not so fine.

This large section was covered in spilled paint tins. It chiseled off with a lot of effort but it was mixed in with melted plastic? We couldn't afford to loose this large area. After a hour or so having made little impression my clever husband suggested that we may be able to use the other side of the boards.

Genius.
 So we started removing the nails. The boards were quite delicate so we had to pull out as many of the nails as possible before trying to lever up the boards. We made the rather foolhardy brave decision to sand the boards in situ in the living room so that the floor lay flat and even. This effectively meant moving this grotty boards of unknown colour and damaged quality in to my clean white room. I was very nervous about this. But it was a much less expensive option and I love the idea of keeping as many features as we can.

Removing the nails was harder than my husband expected, naive optimistic man that he is. We used a weeks annual leave from our jobs to get the whole job done. On the 5th day we were still pulling up nails and my patience was wearing thin. We haven't had a holiday this year ploughing all our spare money in to the house. To  be honest I could have enjoyed a week off just pottering about the house in my pajamas but My husband had other ideas.

So why did it take so long? Well there are 2 nails for every foot of board (sometimes 3) and they are old cut nails well rusted in and about 2 inches long. They all had to be pulled and we found the best tool (in terms of least damage to the fragile boards) was a combination of a hammer and pliers. In involved hammering one side of the pliers under one side of the nail head using the cast iron end and then levering the nails out. Each cut board took approximately 20 mins to get up - the longest taking 28 mins and the quickest being 8 mins! But each board exhausted us and our arms ached something crazy.

Check it out!

The boards were great but the effort really took it out of us. Especially by day 5. We were 3/4 of the way through pulling the boards up but we still had to cut out the damaged bits and cut them to fit, adhere them downstairs, Sand them (at least 5 times), fill the holes (of which there were hundreds) and then wax!

More on the next post!!

Farrow and Ball

I know you guys like a bargain as much as I do - Well Sarah over at Modern Country Style has a great Farrow and Ball giveaway. 3 Sample pots for 10 lucky winners Plus the chance for a 5L tin,

Get yourselves over there and check it out.


http://moderncountrystyle.blogspot.com/2011/10/farrow-and-ball-giveaway.html

Oh what a difference a day makes

Hello hello, How you all doing?

Its been a couple of days since the last post - keeping very busy this end. I expect you are all dying to see what happened after the fireplace went in - yes I know you all that well.
I shall hold you in suspense for no longer. The plaster board went on. Exciting stuff huh?
It was fab actually - finally got a sense of the space and light in the room.
We also got the lights and electrics done. Both were pretty quick processes really as we had a electrician in and my dad is a plasterer.

 The ceiling was the biggest change from the very heavy dark joists. We chose recessed spot lights with halogen/led bulbs because we needed a lot of bulbs in that room and because the ceiling in there is low. We also opted for 4 wall up lighters. All our lights went on to dimmers which I am really pleased about as now it really gives a lot of options in terms of both energy use and of mood in the room. Each bay of the ceiling is on a different circuit so they are all individually controlled.

 Financially by this point the work was taking its toll so we decided not go go for a luxury wall paint but to give it an all over coat with the Dulux Paint pod that we own in a simple white colour.  We will re-paint later down the line.We had already decided that the ceiling should be the same colour as the walls to make the ceilings seem higher.  In the end we went for Timeless white ( as we already had half a pod full from a previous job). It took an age painting it all even with the Paint pod. But the difference was enormous!

 My dad did a fab job plastering the curve of the fireplace.

Oh and we put some curtains up too - as we took over doing all the work at this stage we were working most evenings. The pic above was taken at about midnight. For the curtains I headed over to Dunelm Mill and got some Hessian style natural curtains.

Starting to look room like isn't it? Next begins the saga of the floor - and boy was it a saga!

Busy Bees

Hello, Hope you are all prepared for the weekend. I think its going to be a very cold and very busy one!

I thought today I would share with you all the next step in our living room make over. I left off with a horrid grey screed and a shiny new window.

So once the screed was dry we were able to get the Fireplace done. Now this is something special as it is my area of expertise. That's right I have hidden talents. I chose the fireplace before we even moved in. Its a risk as it is very contemporary and the house was built in 1888. But I like to mix it up. See what you think.

Isn't it a stunner? Well I love it. So after lots of long calculations I managed to order the custom shaped honed granite hearth from a fantastic supplier called Worcestershire stone and Marble. I went with honed granite as it is super durable, easy to keep clean and I love the matt effect. So it started to take shape thanks to my fitting team at Oxford Fireplace Centre. Isn't it shameless plugging your family business??

There it is, hanging from the new beams so that the screed could go in. I left my boys to it and stayed out of the way for the install - nothing worse than a client lingering over you when you need to adjust with a hammer.

Below is at the end of the day.

Excuse the pink - that is the heat resistant boarding. But doesn't it look great? The board over the fire ready for plastering - and a similar curve will go below to cover the supporting blocks. Our honed granite hearth is really going to make the installation.

So I worked out that if we had a fireplace in the room was pretty much livable. After months of sand and mess I wanted one evening in the room . So I set up for a romantic picnic.

A Blanket pinned up at the window and the black jack painted walls made for my kind of shabby chic! Beautifully warm and the first of many more happy evenings to come in our new room.

Please leave me a comment and let me know what you think of our new fireplace.

Inspiration

Good afternoon all.

Hope you all had a lovely weekend and are back in to the swing of things.
Before I launch back in to our living room renovation I thought I would share with you all a couple of inspiring images that I found on Pinterest.

I find looking at all these messy sandy screedy pictures quite tiring. Its vital when doing a big renovation like this to have a door that you can close on all that mess and a book of images that you love or some good blogs to follow to keep your eyes on the prize. Its all to easy to loose sight of what all the mess will become and to get bogged down by it all.

So below are a few lovely inspiring images that kept my mind off the sand and on the sofas!

Aren't they beautiful. For more amazing images I suggest you get your butt over to Pinterest.com and check out some of the awesome ideas that are on there.

Speak to ya all tomorrow x

Screed-a-liscous

Wanna see some Sand? Of course you do - Who wouldn't want to look at sand. I mean honestly!

So they levelled the floor with sand and started on our new wall. The wall will support the 2 new beams and separate the living space from the hallway. That row of blocks is still below floor height.

Then goes on the lovely base layer of concrete over the membrane that will keep this place water tight.

Then up goes the wall.

On the right hand side you can see our inset fire ready to go in. We had to have it dropped off early so we could get it through the garage door before it became a window!

So the wall goes up creating our extra wide opening to the living room. The small existing window on the right of this image comes out and is boarded up ready for the door. A new board is also put up to cover where the garage door has come out.

The supporting steels go in and are propped so that the pad stones can be put in under them. This is about the time I started getting really excited as the proportions of the room make themselves evident.

The builders finish the window opening and clear out. Then they lay the new screed, which we had to refrain from walking on for 2 days (much harder than you think when you cant see the whole room from the door you can get to).

Its a shame I got too keen and left a footprint in it ....

So we have a floor. And next we have a Window.

 We used the bricks from the doorway opening that we created to fill under the new window with matching stones. And we used the same local glazier who made the windows for the kitchen (left) so that the windows match.

So as promised. A window and some Screed.

Have a great weekend. Next week I'll tell you all about how we reclaimed the original floor boards from the Granary loft above to give ourselves a living room floor and you can all take a look at our new living room with some great before and after shots - because we all love those!!

Mess

Good Afternoon! Hope your week is going well. I am feeling particularly Autumn-y today. Something about grey English weather makes me want to rush out and buy fluffy boots.

But back to business, yesterday I promised a  look at the chaos that we lived with for a couple of months to get our Garage converted. Well here it is.

Lovely isn't it. 7 skip loads were dug out and removed. They dug down a few feet - and hit water. This view was taken from my Kitchen door. It was very hard to maintain good order in the rest of the house (which we had to do for the lodgers as well as our own sanity!).

  

Every evening when I got home from work I eagerly looked forward to opening the door and seeing how far the builders had progressed.

Points to note :
Non supporting main beam on resting on the pipes over the door
Alcove on the right destined to be the TV alcove.
Enormous Freezer (I made the mistake of letting my husband choose and purchase the freezer. Its so large that we have had to alter the plans to make a suitable space to accommodate it!!!)

At its worst just after the concrete was poured in to the new foundations.

But it does get better. Next up I'll share the screed and window going in.