Decorating 13

Well, the deadline has arrived. Tomorrow, the furniture should arrive nice and early and then the occupant and my OH should turn up together about lunch time. Hopefully, everything will be in place by the time they get here.

You will be pleased to hear the rain finally stopped - and so did the drip-drip-drip of the leak. Thankfully, it seems to be drying out without having ruined too much. I might have to give the walls a quick coat of paint, but everything else seems to be fine. Let's hope the rain doesn't return before we can fix the leak!

So, today's work.

First, I painted the gloss in the kitchen. It wasn't a lot, but it was fiddly, as it was mostly door frame. Most of the skirting board is hidden behind the units, so there was very little to do there.

After that, I set about tidying and cleaning. I had hoovered the bedrooms yesterday, 

so I started with the bathroom today. I cleaned the floor, sink, toilet and the floor where the bath is going to go.

Then I hoovered the stairs and landing, followed by the hall.

That was the easy bit!

Next came the living room. There were tools and decorating equipment all over the place, not to mention some stray bits of wallpaper trimmings and lots of mess! I had brought two large boxes (I could have done with three). In one, I put the loose tools; in the other, decorating things. The pasting table and some of the decorating equipment I took upstairs for when I paint and paper the front bedroom. I rehung the curtains and poles at each end, then cleared the window sills and the fireplace. Then I hoovered the floor. It was slow work, as there were a lot of little bits all over the place. Once I had hoovered most of the stuff up, I then got down on my hands and knees and did the floor again, using the stair attachment, to make sure all the bits were hoovered up. It seemed to take ages, but that might have had something to do with the fact I went home for lunch part way through!

Once the living room was done, I had to tackle the kitchen. The boxes and tool cases were removed to the car, along with a few other bits and pieces, like the paint roller tray and the tins of colour I no longer need. The rubbish was all bagged and thrown in the bin.

The cupboards were not particularly clean, so staring on top of the wall cupboards, I cleaned every one of them thoroughly. The work surfaces, hob and sink/drainer got similar treatment. It is as clean as I could get it short of buying replacement units! Lastly, I washed the floor.

The whole thing has taken ten hours! Who'd be a cleaner? Or painter and decorator, come to that?

So, is that it? What else is there still to do?

• Stair lift needs fitting
• New light in kitchen
• Blinds in kitchen and bathroom
• Door in side of garage
• New door on front of garage
• Front bedroom still to decorate
• Border paper in kitchen - almost forgot I had bought this!
• The garden needs a complete overhaul

Not much left then, lol!!

Decorating 12

Sunday - considering I try not to work on Sundays, I put in a six hour shift at the house today. I figured that if I didn't, then the decorating was simply not going to be finished. As it is, the spare bedroom is not going to be done till after Moving Day.

So what did we achieve? I spent all afternoon and evening papering in the living room. It still isn't finished, but the whole of the fireplace wall is now done.

The opposite wall is the one that needed plastering where the plaster skim had come off with the paper, as well as some areas round the windows.

OH spent his time making sure the floors were level for the carpets, which are definitely coming tomorrow morning.

Monday - I was expecting a call from the carpet fitters to let me know what time they were coming. I hadn't had one by noon, so I rang them. Apparently, amid profuse apologies, it hadn't been flagged that they needed to call me on my mobile. The fitters were due to arrive between 12 and 2pm. Of course, they arrived as I took a bite out of my sandwich!

They did the bedroom first, then the bathroom, then the landing, stairs and hall. The carpets look really lovely - and the red in the hall is so warm and welcoming.

Meanwhile, I did more papering in the living room. It still isn't finished!!

OH changed the sockets and light switches.

He also shortened the counter top in the kitchen. There was a space underneath the counter for a fridge, but as the space is needed for an upright fridge/freezer, the counter was rather in the way. 

There was a surround at the rear and side of the counter, where it meets the wall. Of course, it had been plastered after the edging had been put in place, so that meant more plastering when he took off the side rail. He decided to leave the back rail on the wall.

The chimney breast wall had been papered yesterday, so I painted that today.

Altogether I put in a 12 hour shift - 8.30am to 9.45pm, with an hour off for my evening meal - cooked by OH.

Tuesday - OH removed the radiators in the living room... 

so I could paper behind them. 

There were lots of fiddly bits to do today - round window ledges, those awful 2" gaps over the windows, and around, behind, over the brackets for the radiators.

At last, it's finished!!

The final piece:

Then I painted it all, despite the paste not being dry. And OH replaced the radiators.

Between us, but mostly OH, we removed most of the furniture that isn't required in the house. OH took the electric bed to pieces and we managed to get it bit by bit down the stairs, including the mattress - which led us to make a decision. We are not going to fit the stair lift until after the furniture has arrived. It was pretty difficult to get the bed downstairs, so we figured it might be difficult for the removal men to get furniture upstairs, particularly if there is a stair lift taking up half the width of the stairs. So that will be fitted on Friday afternoon, when the removal men have been and gone.

The rest of the electrics have now been sorted out too - new sockets and light switches where they are needed.

Finally, I painted one wall in the kitchen. I have chosen a warm yellow, as the kitchen faces north, but I wondered as I put it on the wall, whether I had chosen too strong a colour. I decided to leave the rest until tomorrow, when I could see whether it dried lighter or darker and basically what it looks like in daylight.

Another 12 hour shift - and at around 9.30 I realised I had only sat down for half an hour today, when I had my evening meal. I even ate lunch on my feet while holding a paint roller in one hand and my sandwich in the other!!

Wednesday - today was a time for finishing little things off and completing tasks.

The yellow in the kitchen looked fine, so I painted the rest of the walls the same colour.

OH took the radiator off so I could paint behind it. As he did so, one of the brackets simply fell off the wall. The wall is hollow, so needs special plugs to ensure they don't just fall off. These are like crocodile clips, but are open, rather than shut when at 'rest'. They close as you put them through the wall, then open up and hold the screw tightly against the plasterboard. Whoever had fitted the radiator had taken the crocodile part off the screw and then put it back on the wrong way round. So when we pulled on the radiator, the bracket came off with it, pulling the closed clip through the drilled hole!

When OH put it back, he swapped the clips round, so the brackets are held on securely.

OH checked and finished all the electric sockets and switches and then took all the furniture from the living room and put it in the garage. Then he collected up some necessary tools and we took him to the train station. He was going south to bring the new householder back to his new house.

When I had finished all the painting, I tidied upstairs. The front bedroom was more or less tidy, but there were still bits all over the floor and some random bits and pieces. I picked up the bits and hoovered the floor. I also put away the spare bit of carpet we are going to use in the walk-in cupboard.

After that, I hoovered the bits of fluff from the new carpet off the bathroom floor and the landing floor. Then turned my attention to the back bedroom. I could have cried! The leak in the corner of the wardrobe has returned and it is damaging all my hard work!! There is a damp patch on the ceiling, two damp patches on the wall, and the corner of the carpet is damp too. The walls will probably need doing again and the carpet has been taken up so as to avoid damage L

Decorating 11

Friday: The weather has turned suddenly cold - a day or two ago, it was 16 degrees; today it was only five! But the good thing is the house is warm - and there is no heating on yet. It doesn't take much for me to work up a sweat when working on projects around the place. That can only be a good thing.

So, what did we get up to today?

Firstly, I painted all the gloss work in the living room. There was the skirting all the way round (the room is about 20 feet long and ten feet wide) and there are two doors that obviously have surrounds that also needed painting. It didn't take as long as I thought it might., so it was done in less than half a day.

Next, once the paint had dried (it's a quick drying variety, so after lunch it was dry enough to work near it), I started on the papering. If you remember, the walls were already papered with lining paper; it had been hung horizontally, as lining paper should be, then painted over. I had taken the decision some time ago that I would not be removing the lining paper, but just papering right over the top of it. So that's what I started to do, but then had misgivings. Where the lining paper was joined, there were lines showing through the new paper; where there had been bubbles in the lining paper (that I couldn't see before putting the new paper on top - did the dampness of the paste raise them? Don't know), those were also showing through. I hung one roll's worth of paper (four drops) and decided to leave it to dry and look at it again tomorrow. 

These run intermittently the whole length of the wall - three lines per wall, as there are three rows of lining paper

If the bubbles settled down and if the lines were smoothed out as the new paper dried, then that would be okay. If not, I would need to make the decision whether to strip the lining paper after all.

So, while I was doing that, OH was working on several projects:

The old toilet seat was made out of something like MDF, that had been painted or sprayed with some plasticky substance. Unfortunately, the paint, or whatever it is, had not covered the whole of the under side of the toilet seat, so it was stained and, well, unpleasant. So a new toilet seat was purchased and OH fitted it today. To match the sink and cistern, we got a shell patterned lid. As it looks exactly the same as the one we replaced, I don't have a photo - we all know what a toilet seat looks like!

As I said yesterday, we had our own mini version of the Mariana Trench between the front door and the actual hall floor. We got some quick drying cement and filled the trench. It now looks like the floor and the door are meant to look - adjacent to each other, without a huge gap!

Not sure why this one has come out vertical - it's looking down at the floor where the gap has been filled

He also removed the glued in carpet from the bottom of the door frame at each end.

Oh dear, my poor hallway; it was so tidy yesterday

Needless to say, not only was this necessary, it didn't stay like this for long - it's all tidy again now - besides, I make enough mess of my own, so I really can't complain

There were some tweakings that needed doing to the electrics, such as the back boxes replacing behind some sockets and one socket was sloping downhill, so that was straightened. The old wires that were snaking around the floor and just came to a cut end have now been tidied up. And the conduit for the wiring for the stair lift has been put in place.

A nice shiny new rail has been cut to size and fitted in the wardrobe too.

So what went wrong today? Was this a day when we had no mishaps? Of course not! We discovered the radiator in the hall was leaking. It wasn't a very big leak, but a leak, none the less.

Probably a good thing the carpet fitters aren't coming tomorrow after all.

Saturday: So, the moment of truth - had the wall paper dried out and flattened enough to be satisfactory? I went to the house first thing to check...

But you'll have to wait for the news, good or bad!

After looking at the paper, I had a few errands to run. For one thing, I was running out of wall paper, so I had to go get some more. I also got the paper for the feature wall in the front bedroom - it's cream with a leaf pattern on it, but you'll see that when I have hung it on the wall.

I also bought the curtains for the back bedroom. They are a faux silk and are lovely, but I haven't hung them yet, so there's no picture. I had a choice. The window is 46" from top to bottom, and 74" wide. I could get curtains that were 54" long, but only 46" wide. Two of these makes 92", which isn't quite one and a half times the width of the window, which is what they recommend. The alternative was to get curtains that are 66" long (so covering the top of the radiator, thus allowing the heat to go up the inside of the curtains, instead of heating the room) and 76" wide, which is just over twice the width of the window. If I bought the longer ones, I would need to shorten them; if I got the shorter ones, they might look too skimpy. I eventually bought the longer ones, but I'm inclined to change them for the shorter ones - after all, there are blinds fitted as well, so the curtains might be more decorative than useful.

By the time I returned to the house, I discovered OH had put the curtain pole back, so all I had to do was hang the curtains, but because I am still not certain if I got the right ones, I haven't done that yet.

There is just one more plank to fit in the back bedroom floor now. The way the floor boards had been cut before meant that the end of at least one was hanging over open space instead of resting on a joist. OH needed a short length of spare board to re-cut things so everything was properly supported. He found a bit that happened to be just the right size - underneath the bath. Well, it was now lying on the bathroom floor where the bath used to be, but it had been under the bath while the bath was still in the bathroom!

He also rehung the wardrobe doors so they close properly and the knobs are more or less level.

After doing all that, it was almost lunch time, so I didn't get to the house till after lunch. And I took another look at the wallpaper in the living room. To be honest, I really wasn't happy about it, but asked OH for a second opinion. He didn't seem very satisfied with it either - so we made our decision - leave it as it is and just live with it; or start paper stripping again?

Do you remember that old joke about the guy who fell out of an aeroplane - fortunately, he had a parachute - unfortunately, it failed to open - fortunately, there was a haystack, etc? Well, it was a bit like that:

Good news - originally, we thought it was good that we didn't need to remove the lining paper

Bad news - unfortunately, it turned out the lining paper had been badly applied and the errors showed through the new paper on top

It really wasn't much better today, sadly. The photos don't really show the extent of the problem. The blob on the photo doesn't help matters, either!

Good news - for the most part, it came off easily enough - yes, we decided to remove it all!! Three of the walls are external walls, so are solid instead of partition and the fourth wall is partly chimney breast, so that is also solid. The paper is much easier to remove from the solid walls.

As a bonus, you even got a shot of me, working!

Bad news - of course, we didn't have the stripper we had hired any longer and as it was after 12.30pm on a Saturday, the hire shop was shut - so we took the decision to buy one. It will come in useful when we have other decorating projects at home to deal with and the cost is barely more than a week's hire. Okay, so it isn't a big industrial heavy duty thing, so needs filling more often, but it does the job. Thank goodness we have a DIY store just a couple of miles down the road! We are thinking of buying beds and moving in!!

Bad news (again) - The wall is made of concrete, with a plaster skim on top. The plaster had at one time been painted. The paint was now in very poor condition and was patchy, which explains the odd shaped shadows we had seen under the lining paper when we happened to shine a really bright light on it yesterday. 

There was also a bright green patch right in the middle of the long wall! What's that all about, then? 

While the paper came off easily, we also found that the plaster skim wasn't altogether attached to the wall either. You know how an egg shell looks when you have hit it with a spoon? Well, areas of the wall looked like that, only as if it had been hit from the other side. In some places, the skim came off with the wall paper, so some replastering/filling is needed. 

At least the windows have been sealed onto the wall and not onto the paper, but it will all need doing again - it's such a mess! 

And the electrics aren't very pretty, either.

Sometimes, you wish you had never started a job, but then again, if it's done properly this time, it should be good for some time to come.

So, instead of putting the new paper on, I have spent the afternoon and evening taking paper off - and making my own mess, which OH helpfully cleared up for me.

I was hoping the days of paper stripping were over, but it was not to be and as a result, we have found even more work that needs doing <sigh> We need to get some plaster, as we used the other in the kitchen, so OH fixed the leak in the radiator instead. I guess I won't be finishing the papering tomorrow then. But then, I won't waste the time; I'll start on the front bedroom or the kitchen. Plenty more to be done yet!