If you follow me on Instagram you'll have seen that I spent most of my weekend getting covered in Polyfilla dust thanks to sanding down the endless filled-in cracks in the walls. After doing the first full week back at work after Christmas and spending two days on my hands and knees rubbing the walls like a woman possessed, it's fair to say I'm bloody exhausted! But it definitely feels like we're making progress as should be able to start painting the dining room soon. Hoorah.
I'll take you through all the different room reveals with before and after pics as we finish them, but today I thought I'd share the very beginning of our journey, with all the scary ugly bits! Feels like a lifetime ago that the house looked how it used to.
I mentioned in my 2014 highlights post that we got the keys to the house back in the summer when luckily we still had a couple of months left of our flat tenancy, so we could work on the house of an evening or weekend and still return to our home comforts. When we bought it, the house was all done up in the usual magnolia paint so appeared mostly liveable. The kitchen and bathroom were both dire and we knew we'd have to rip them out. However the bad news was after we had the survey that there was a pretty bad damp problem, so the whole ground floor would need stripping back to the brick to a height of 1m. We also decided to open up the fireplaces that had been bricked up and take out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, which used to be the old back wall so still had an ugly window in place. Hence we had to make a huge bloody mess before we could even get to a blank canvas to start building on!
Here's how the downstairs looked when we bought it...
Pretty, right? We started ripping out the kitchen literally the first night we stayed at the house, after we'd drunk our champagne and eaten our Dominos pizza picnic on the floor of the lounge. So over the next couple of months we cracked on with tearing things apart. It looked pretty scary at times, and like I couldn't ever imagine having to live there.
Oh I forgot to mention that we also took down the old wall between the end of the kitchen and the bathroom which is on the ground floor at the back of the extension. It was so damp we could just pull most of the wood away with our hands. We rebuilt the wall and moved the doorframe so could reconfigure which side the bath and toilet are on, and have a much longer run of kitchen units.
Anyway, that last photo above is how the house looked when we had to move in in mid September. The plasterer we used took ages to get finished, so unfortunately those were our living quarters for a couple of weeks.
Since then we've had the whole house re-wired, freshly plastered, and now our bathroom and kitchen are both almost done. It definitely had its challenges but at least all the hardest work is done now and we can start thinking about decorating! It's been fun too, even though The Boyfriend doesn't look like he's amused.
I think I'll be popping up a post about what I want our bathroom to look like when it's done some time this week so check back if you fancy a nosy.
Kirstie xo.
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