Bedroom 2 - Decorating Complete!

Apologies for the tardiness of this post! We did indeed get bedroom 2 finished and in time to get the radiator back on the wall for our lovely new boiler to be fitted (there will be a post on that soon I hope). Unfortunately, that weekend we also shifted everything that had been filling our living room up into bedroom 2 so it was out of the way which made taking "after" photos a bit tricky. I've had a stab at it though, so here we go...

Before: The walls weren't in a great state - there were some massive cracks (but mostly they were difficult to capture in a photo)

The plaster around the window has been repaired 

At the top of the window we removed a piece of wood that the curtain pole was attached to, re-plastered and put some proper coving in place.

The skirting didn't line up where an old chimney breast had been removed.

This wall had the old chimney breast in it and  hadn't been properly  plastered when they removed it. Although you can't see it from the photos, there has been a big improvement.

Before, During, After: The window

Currently we're using this space to store everything whilst we sort out our lounge

Once we've finished the lounge/diner we will finally be able to unpack and turn this from a storage space to a proper room - we'll post more pictures when we finally get to that stage. It still needs curtains and obviously we need to furnish it.

Work is beginning on the lounge/diner on the 12th August with our Electrician returning to sort out all of the many plug sockets that were left without electric after the kitchen was fixed and also to add some new ones in and replace the consumer unit whilst he's at it.

Here's a before and during of our poor lounge...

Left: Lounge/Diner just after we moved it; Right: current state... its getting better slowly!

Bedroom 2 - The update...

The plasterer has been!  Here's the timelapse (again!) for the plastering being done.  It cuts out early as I managed to mess up charging the camera, but hopefully you should get the gist!

It has thrown up a few surprises, such as realising that the ceiling is not properly fixed in place.  It appears that whoever plasterboarded the ceiling just nailed the boards to the existing ceiling, rather than to the joists themselves.  The consequence if this is that, if you climb a ladder, you can push the ceiling upwards by about an inch!  The plan is to screw it properly to the joists and then hopefully, at some point in the future, finish it off with coving.


The other surprise was the amount of woodchip wallpaper that I found hiding underneath the paint yesterday.  That was another couple of hours of my life that I'll never get back!  Large swathes of it was (very helpfully covered in Polyfilla, meaning that we weren't quite sure how far we had to strip the paper back.  It was a bit of trial and error!

If anyone in the area would like a brilliant plasterer, ours comes very highly recommended:

Palace Plastering

Bedroom 2 - The quick version!

So.  We had the next BIG push on the house this weekend!  Bedroom 2.  Hopefully, this should allow us to stop living in the lounge quite so much! 

Here is the (very quick) video version of what we did.  We've spent the last two days stripping two lathe and plaster walls (which were, unfortunately, beyond repair) in preparation of the plasterer who is coming on Tuesday morning.  It was either that or wait until June to get the room done.

For those who have never stripped a lathe and plaster wall, believe EVERYTHING that anyone else says about how messy it is.

We'll update you all again once we've had another development.