DIY central - another weekend dedicated to the house

Since we have moved into our wonderful house, we seem to have become rather unexciting Londoners. Every weekend, we dedicate quite a bit of the time to making our house prettier, and when we do go out, it is my favourite subject to talk to anyone who will listen. The first big project was painting all of the rooms which we whizzed through over two weekends, and with a little help from my jet-lagged brother. We decided not to paint the hall and landing as the colour was neutral already and it seemed like quite a lot of effort! The three bedrooms and two downstairs rooms all got a splash of 'off white', with the little third bedroom (my den), having a delectable feature wall in a teal colour. I'm just so with the home decor fashions.

Since we have finished the painting, it has given us time to do some more exciting work on the house. First project was putting the dartboard up in the games room. You know you have too many rooms when you have a den and a games room! Part of my negotiations with D to secure full power over the third bedroom has resulted in him having full power over the dining (games) room as long as there is a table in there for dining purposes. He is currently ordering pictures for the wall (I fear we are going to have an Alex Ferguson poster...) and there is already a trophy shelf up to show off his sporting accolades. We went quite artsy with some shelving for the 'sports TV' by buying a cheap pine shelf and boring white brackets, but then staining the wood a darker colour and spraying the brackets blue to make them look rather funky. Photos to come once they are up on the wall!



My main project has been my curtain making, one room down (the smallest one), four rooms to go. It turns out that curtain making is quite time consuming and took me about five hours to make the pair. I chose a classy elephant design (rather than a childish elephant design) in neutral colours. I made up how to make them after having a look through a few tutorials, but am pretty pleased with the outcome; they hang well, slide across the rail smoothly and look pretty darn snazzy. Now I just need to get cracking on the second pair!

The most exciting development of the weekend has been knocking the board out that covered our living room fireplace and finding out what was behind it. There was a lot of dirt and dust, but also quite a cool exposed brickwork which will be a perfect backdrop to the artsy flower and candle set up I am planning. Now we just need to work out how to stop the drafts coming in before it is cold again!

We are in!

One week ago and we got the keys! With excitement, and a small amount of trepidation, we entered our new house. What would we find? Furniture the seller couldn’t be bothered to move (the estate agent had suggested that this may happen…), a filthy kitchen, dead bodies? Luckily the house was empty, the kitchen wasn’t too filthy and we haven’t found the dead bodies yet. The loft does remain unexplored though….!  The house was pretty much as we remembered it, needing a nice big cosmetic touch but generally in an ok condition. The daydreams I had been having for months on interior design could finally be realised.

The next couple of days followed with moving and buying aplenty but without much time to start on the house. Work then got in the way of really starting project ‘House’ but I guess we have to pay for all of this in some way. Happily, this weekend, we have four whole days to throw ourselves into the decorating, good old Easter bank holidays! I sit in our garden chair in the living room on Friday evening with one room having seen one coat of paint. Possibly not the most we could have done in one day…. however, many a room has been taped with mask (not sure that quite works!), bumps have been sanded and holes have been filled. Now we just need to paint! One tin down and we are ready for an early morning trip to Homebase to stock up on more of the finest Dulex to get going on the other rooms.

Another port of call tomorrow is a trip to the craft warehouse in Tooting, an Aladdin’s cave of many exciting treasures to start every type of creative project you can imagine. As I have decided to make my own curtains, with my shiny new sewing machine, I can’t wait to go and start selecting some fabrics. People keep asking if it is going to be hard to make the curtains myself but how hard can sewing in a straight line be? I can probably help answer that next weekend! I have spent the past few weeks browsing curtain fabrics on eBay and there is a fabulous selection to be found but can’t wait to browse in real life! Reality will probably then hit when I realise I have no idea what I’m doing and that our neighbours can still see straight into our living room two months later.

So far, I’m aware that my blog has rather been lacking in pictures. I will definitely be adding them in the future but we haven’t had the internet for about three weeks now, and adding pictures using my smartphone sounds a little too advanced for little technophobe me. It took me long enough to work out how to send the words from my laptop to my phone using Bluetooth so I think pictures are beyond me at the moment. This just means you’ll have to come back soon for a more illustrated update…

The most expensive shopping I have ever been on

So after a couple of impatient weeks, we finally exchanged contracts and will be moving this Friday. Five days and counting! Preparations are under way for the big move, bags are being packed and nooks and crannies are being cleaned. I find it quite sad that the most sparkling the flat has ever been will be as we are stepping out the front door and saying goodbye. At least we can start off with some tough scrubbing in the new house so hopefully it will glisten for a little while… before we fall into our old, slightly grubby, habits.

Anyway, this isn't a blog about cleaning, as cleaning just isn't that interesting, and more a blog about decorating and décor. D and I spent hours trawling around a retail park yesterday; it was definitely designed for cars and not pedestrians, so we exhausted ourselves walking around the gigantic complex. After looking at endless beds and lying on endless mattresses, with a stereotypical salesman trying to sway us towards the ‘fabulous beds on discount’, we finally made a decision. We went for two pine bed frames and some snazzy mattresses to match. We treated ourselves to an extra 15cm by buying a king-size for ourselves. Probably a good thing after just eating a rather large slice of D’s birthday cake… very tasty but not good for the waistline!

Next up were sofas. After falling in love with the first sofa in the first shop, we did our due diligence and wondered around a couple more shops marvelling at how the majority of sofas are pretty horrible and just not that comfortable. Returning to the first shop, we had to admit that our living room just wouldn't work with a corner sofa (surely the dream?!) and bought a two seater and a three seater. Controversially, we went for a grey sofa. I’m often quite anti grey but after seeing a picture of a grey sofa with bright cushions, I became a little obsessed with a neutral décor and lots of bright accessories. Pinterest is my new favourite website and is helping my uncreative mind get on-board with some fabulous colour scheme visions and so grey was the chosen one.

When it comes to sofas, it’s obviously important to have a pretty one but the priority has to be comfort. The world’s comfiest sofa belonged to my Grandma and Gramps. I’m sure the sofa was older than me, cost two and sixpence and wouldn’t get the osteopath’s stamp of approval, but boy was it comfy. It entertained many a Williams nap after a tiring day down the beach, or, more likely, one too many glasses of wine over a delicious Grandma dinner. I’m just hoping that our sofa of choice can be half the sofa that this one was (RIP).

Having spent far too much money on these essentials, which won’t be delivered for numerous weeks ensuring that we will become very familiar with our trusty old Argos airbed, we finally dragged ourselves to B+Q to quickly pick up some ‘off white’ paint samples to test on our new walls. As I’m sure any first time paint buyer has experienced, our jaws hit the floor when we saw the amount of choice that an ‘off white’ specification brings. Seriously?! Not feeling confident in our ability to narrow down the choices, we just grabbed a few which we liked the names of and headed on our merry way. Furniture shopping part one was complete.

Where it all begins...

So, I sit here in our rented flat, surrounded by half packed boxes and half hearted cleaning attempts. It seems that whiling away an afternoon on the internet being "inspired" by home decor sites has been a lot more exciting that cleaning out the cupboards in the kitchen. 

I'll give you a bit of background about myself. I'm in the process (hopefully towards the end) of buying my first house with my boyfriend (D). We've bought a house that definitely has some work to be done on it, mainly cosmetic though so we plan to do most of it ourselves. However, we are both analysts, we spend our days playing with spreadsheets, formulas and logic; essentially, neither of us have a creative bone in our body. Not to be put off by this, I have recently spent most of my free time, and quite a lot of dull meeting time, dreaming about becoming a super cool interior designer with the most stylish house in South East London. Obviously without spending much money, we don't live in Chelsea y'know. 

So this is where this blog comes in. I'm going to track our progress and DIY attempts to make our house wonderful, starting with basically no knowledge but a fair amount of enthusiasm. D has a shiny new toolbox with a hammer and two screwdrivers in it, I've just decided on the sewing machine I'm going to buy to make my own curtains, cushion covers and whatever else you can make out of fabric. My only real sewing experience is a GCSE in textiles, where I made a delightful, if a little lopsided, wall hanging for children. Let's just say, it never made it onto any child's bedroom wall.

So now we just have to wait for the lawyer type people to do the official bits and we can move in and get going!