Where did the time go?

4 Months! I must have blinked and not noticed! Sorry for the lack of updates but since the builders "finished" it seems like life got even more hectic. I cant believe we haven't even put a picture of the finished article, well the outside at least (just don't look at the paint) So here it is before and after! (The before isn't too great I'm afraid)

Of course it doesn't all end there, oh no, because we now have the interior to finish and decorate. We still have no handrail up on the stairs because I wanted to decorate the hall first but to do the hall I would need to do the woodwork. To do the woodwork meant lots of sanding, filling, priming, undercoating, glossing and.. I'm sure you get the picture. I started of quite well by mist coating (very watered down paint mix) all the walls and ceilings that had new plaster on them some needing two coats as it just drank the stuff.

Things were going a little too easy at this point so our one and only shower in the house decided it was going to leak on us, I found this one afternoon when a big wet patch had formed on the carpet outside the bathroom. Further investigation found a big wet patch in the living room ceiling below as well eek! Oddly the wall where the shower was mounted was dry so we thought it was leaking around the base of the shower. A bit of sealant and a couple of showers later the wet patch was getting worse. I pulled a bit of the wall off to see where the pipes were and ended up pulling the whole section of wall down where the shower was to find an isolation valve in the wall, drip drip dripping!! Sadly I thought I had some pictures of this but I can't find them so just imagine a stud wall with no plaster board on it!!!

After the wall was then plastered a new we decided to get a new chippy in to come and complete all the skirting and architrave around the doors (yay more wood for me to treat!) By the time all this was done we decided to concentrate on getting the front "guest" bedroom done, which will become our bedroom until we get our main room done one day (years away at this rate) after much deliberation we went for... magnolia in the room, the colour would come from the curtains and bedsheets. "Bedsheets can be changed, paint isn't as easy" or so I was told. So here are some pictures of the room and the new curtains and curtain poles etc.

(we know the bed covers don't quite match but its the closest we can find at the moment, it seems impossible to find a nice raspberry looking bed cover) Oh I almost forgot the bathroom door put us even further behind. We decided to try and get our pine doors to match the oak stair rail we would soon have up, we knew you wouldn't get an exact match but we thought it would be nice to have similar tones. So we bought some Fiddes hard wax oil, English Oak, I did exactly what it said on the tin, sanded it back with 150 grade paper and, well, lets just say it had less than perfect results!

As you can see it went on dark and very patchy! needless to say Jo was not very impressed when she came home from work (why oh why did I keep putting it on!!) So, my next 3 days were taken up sanding the door back down to its bare bones!

That was half way through the process, eventually I got it looking as new (almost) and we decided to go for the CLEAR hard wax oil in the end which looked a lot better. We finally moved into the bedroom last weekend (yay!) we wont even mention that the bathroom grout had cracked a bit in the shower unit so I had to seal that up.