Before and after

I thought it would be interesting to see the room just after we moved in. What the photo doesn't clearly show are the lovely orange / yellow wallpaper, green carpet, stained ceiling and crumbling plaster. Nice.

Nearly there!

Curtains are up, tree is up, moved some of the retro furtniture back in that came with the house and suddenly its feeling much more like a home.

New Sofa

Our lovely new corner chaise sofa arrived this week and here it is pride of place in the sitting room.














We've also started moving stuff back into the dining room. At last we have our house back!

Bedroom Makover

Work has started on the 2nd bedroom. We've decided to create more storage space above the stairs for a wardrobe.















Here we've knocked through one wall into the eve's to create a huge storage space (got to have somewhere for Densie to put all her shoes)

First Coat of Varnish

Floor Sanding

Check out the before and after pics. It was a hard slog but definitely worth it. 4 coats of varnish tomorrow and then the major work is all finished! (well for the sitting room that is...)

Ripping out the carpet

Today was spent putting on 2 coats of 'Cotton Linen' and ripping up the carpet. The floorboards are in pretty good condition. Now is the long job of filling in every gap between all the boards...

2nd Coat of Paint

The painting begins

The replastering has finished and we're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.

This weekend was spent painting 2 coats of white emsulsion on the sitting room. The following photo's show it inbetween coats.

The walls will be painted a slightly darker colour, haven't decided on which yet.

After that, floorboard sanding, which should be fun!

Our new allotment

After being on the waiting list for 4 months (we were originally told 12 months) I had a call today to let us know that we had a quarter plot available. We had a choice of three, one of which was like day of the triffids, so decided to give that a miss. In the end we went for one next to the hedge, which means we can put storage boxes up and we have our own walkway.

The plot is only 100m from the house as you can see from the map.

It definitely needs a little tlc, but comes with a cherry tree and lots of berries.

A summer harvest

Things are really coming together in the veg patch now. Check out the crop of cherry toms and green beans, just enough for a small salad! Not on here was our massive blackberry picking, that went in a crumble.

A decent cooker at last!

Today was a special day with the installation of Denise's pride and joy, her rangemaster cooker. Having spent 2.5 years in storage it was finally dusted off and connected up and I must admit its a beauty.

Start of the electrics

No sooner had we started on the electrics things have ground to a halt after our electrician walked off the job after 3.5 days. It seems the stress of having customers who hadn't completely made up their mind about outdoor lighting and the the loft, combined with the discovery of a wasp then a bees nest was too much for him.

At least we have (hopefully) safe electrics. You can see the start of the many new electrical points and also the beginnings of all the speaker cables buried in the walls. Just need to find someone to finish it off now!

Lets get stripping!

This weekend I discovered a new form of torture. Forget Takeshi's Castle or the Marathon Des Sables; if you really want to punish someone give them an electric wallpaper stripper and get them to strip a living room, dining room AND the ceilings and see if they're still standing at the end of it.

Chances are they'll be a gibbering wreck.

But there's no gain without pain and I think we definitely have a bit of both after this weekend. Denise likened it to living in a world war two bunker, and I think she's not far off.

Lots of photo's and information coming soon all about our house in Claygate, Surrey.