A Fantabulous Year in Review

July 2015

Got the keys and started work!

First thing I did was gut the upstairs bedroom and rip out some old plaster.

August 2015

Karen and I rip out the front room fireplace and find some awesome original tiles!

Then while gutting the bathroom I find a secret door

The kitchen gets rewired D;

September 2015

My dad helps me install a new bath in the bathroom:

And a new sink

The front bedroom gets replastered and then sanded

Then given a splash of colour!

October 2015

The front door gets a new stained glass piece made and installed

With one room finished I hire a tiny van and move all my stuff in

November 2015

The kitchen gets replastered and repainted

My dad helps me put in the sink of my dreams- annnnd a dishwasher!

December 2016

Some nice builders take out my back window and put a set of double doors in instead.

Then they knock through the downstairs

At the same time after weeks of working when I had the time…

…I finish off the kitchen with lots of help from others

Just in time for the feast of friendsmas!

January 2016

I paint the secret bathroom door tardis blue

And finally finish off the bathroom

(sorta)

 

I also remove the second fireplace downstairs.

And cover the kitchen in tiles

Then finally, properly finish the kitchen off.

…January was busy.

February 2016

 

Downstairs gets stripped down, plastered and sanded within an inch of it’s life.

I go insane painting a 10x5m (32×16 foot) room white

The rainbow chandeliers take their proper place

I reinstall some ‘original’ features as best I can.

March 2016

I paint the workroom floor green and realise I am a chameleon.

April 2015

After weeks of painting, sanding and shelf building I finally move into my workroom!

Then with more plans in the works I move my bed into the front bedroom/living room, ready to tackle the middle bedroom.

Then I go totally off plan and decide to take out an upstairs wall because YOLO

May 2016

Convention seasons starts again and I’m busy as hell.

During this time I work on stripping down the middle room and find some super cool original wallpaper.

I go on a hunt for a porch door

And get the middle room replastered.

June 2016

I basically do nothing because I’m at a convention every weekend for a month and am filled with tired and sadness

July 2016

With the one year mark coming up I panic and spend 2 weeks manic working on the middle room.

I sand the floor by hand with a belt sander

Accidentally paint the room salmon pink

Borrow Karen for help in the last few days

Today

Then on July 17th, one year after buying the house, I finally have a proper living room.

I’ll update a post of the full workings of the middle room and some round up photos once I’ve moved my books in, but that’s a rough guide to the first year in the Fantabulous house. I’ve got some scary wall repairs and a bathroom conversion downstairs to come in the future, but for now the worst is over and all that can wait until when I’m good and ready.

It’s been a year of elated highs and miserable dust covered lows, but it’s nice to look back on all that’s been done instead of the ever growing ‘to do’ list of the future. I’ve updated the post archive with dates so you can look back on the past posts- enjoy the journey, it’s a rough one! A big thanks to everyone who helped get stuck in with me- Particularly my Mum, Dad, Karen, Ruben, Amanda and Clementine- you’ve all gotten as filthy as I in my quest to have the house of my dreams.

Now it’s time to have a proper house warming- Until next time, cheers from the Fantabulous house!

 

 

 

Bye bye bedroom… Say hello to the hallway library.

It’s been an…interesting week at the Fantabulous house, to say the least. This April I’ve been tackling the middle bedroom, which is also been where I’ve been sleeping/living for the last half year as it was the ‘best’ room in the house.

As a reminder, here’s the floor plan once again:

Here’s the room empty of everything- dated but not too awful!

The room came with all these built in shelves which while useful storage, took up about 2.5ft of space, making the room look much smaller than it actually is.

The old wallpaper was also peeling due to some (now fixed!) roof leaking issues. The entire room just needed to be emptied, stripped down, replastered and repainted.

Which unfortunately meant moving the living room about and making that my sleeping area for the next few weeks.

I installed a rail for my clothes and generally moved it about a bit.

It feels weird entertaining my guests in my boudoir… but all for the greater good!

My mum helped me rip the cupboards out- this desk came out with nary a scratch on it… so FREE DESK!

Carpet spike strip…my old nemesis.

I have no idea why they decided to leave this space empty? Look at all that precious storage space just WASTED for 30 years.

Unfortunately there was no super cool fireplace behind the book shelves. At some point someone went around this house blocking off the fireplaces with plaster, which sounds like a good idea to reduce drafts, but unless you install a grill like here leads to awful condensation build up in the chimney breast. I’ll replace this one with a sexy victorian style one at some point.

This wardrobe might have been a bit big.

And that’s the wall exposed! Check out that pink wallpaper.

Goodbye gross carpet.

Underneath the carpet was lino which I kept down to protect the floorboards during the plastering/other work.

And that’s the room done and ready to have the wallpaper stripped!

Except when I poked about on the one wall to check the condition of everything… we discovered something rather strange…

Turns out the wall separating the hallway and this bedroom was actually lath and plaster, the victorian equivalent of a stud wall. Horsehair and lime, the whole shabang.

My mum made a joke like ‘Haha you could just knock through it into the hallway’

Me: ‘Ha, yeah I COULD just make it all one big room. Like a big library with stairs going into it. Like an atrium… like a living room like I’ve… already got up here.’

Mum: ‘I shouldn’t have said anything, should I?’

Me: ‘OH MY GAWD’

I then spent the next few days furiously talking to my friends about whether or not I should take this wall out.

Con: Turns a 3 bed into a 2 bed, lowering the resale value of the house. 

Pro: I’m using a room upstairs as a living room anyway so I wouldn’t lose any rooms. I’m not planning on moving any time soon and a stud wall isn’t that expensive to put back. 

Con: It’ll be super messy to take down and you have to move a radiator. 

Pro: If I’m going to take it down, now is the time to do it while renovating the house. I’ll have to move a radiator but it will open up the hallway, use that wasted space and make the hallway much lighter. 

(Here’s an idea of how dark the hallway is, photo taken on a normal day with no lights on)

Con: It’s hella weird and people will think you’re crazy

Pro: THAT’S WHY IT WILL BE AMAZING

I double checked my budget and realised that this would not cost me much more than keeping the bedroom.  I’ve learnt with this house is to work with what opportunities are given to you, and I knew that if I DIDN’T take this wall down I’d regret it for the next 10 years, always wondering what the room would be like.

The next week I had a structural engineer visiting to confirm some things with my back wall and I had him double check if I could take the wall out. He said it would be no problem…and that I should totally do it.

So… I did.

Theoretically removing this wall should make one SPECTACULAR room which will then become my hub for entertaining guests, smoking my pipe (if I had one) and storing my books, officially making it worthy of the title ‘Library’.

I just had to take down one little wall to do it.

First step was disconnecting the radiator and moving the hallway carpet as well as turning off the sockets upstairs. Then covering up all doors to other rooms with dust sheets, because it was time to get DUSTY

My friend Ben who was helping me said ‘I’ll put on my dust mask later when it gets bad’ before we began, to which I said ‘NO. You put on your dust mask NOW because you have no idea what we’re about to unleash upon this innocent world.’

And unleash we did.

Once the plaster was crowbared and hammered off (and swept into rubble bags because oh my GAWD) it was time to start levering off the laths. This was exhausting but also incredibly satisfying.

Here you can see how the plaster stays on the laths on the other side- it’s splodged through to make sure the wall doesn’t fall off.

Here you can see the first tiny hole peeking through!

This wall had some cool wallpaper underneath- anyone know what decade this is?

At this point it was getting late so we tidied up and ate lots of food ready for day 2.

All the laths were carefully bundled up and about 20 rubble sacks filled with plaster and wallpaper.

The light at the end of the tunnel was in sight, but we still had a long way to go!

 

After a big breakfast the next day we pushed on to finish the job.

Here you can see how dark the hallway is even on a sunny day!

Once the laths were all gone it was time to take care of the studs. These were built with giant victorian nails so once I’d sawn through them I had to hit them with a hammer to dislodge them then wiggle back and forth until they popped off.

Fun fact- the horizontal studs are called noggins. Carpentry is adorable.

Of all the things I’ve done on this house, this was genuinely the most physically exhausting. Ben and I would occasionally have breaks consisting of us just lying still on the ground in silence like ‘oh my god I can’t even bring myself to speak’

Last vertical stud! Each one was chopped through using a circular saw on both sides.

Then rocked back and forth to get the nail out without damaging the surrounding wood.

It was super filthy, terrifying work. While this wall didn’t support the house it was still attached to the ceiling in places and it was my job to wiggle these out as gently as possible to preserve the ceiling and the coving.

BUT IT IS DONE NOW, AND THERE IS NO TURNING BACK.

Some tidying later… and here is the new room.

The best part is when you come up the stairs and the house just opens out like ‘Hello friend’

‘Look at all the light I have from the two windows’

‘Look at how nice my bannister looks now you can see it from the side’

‘You know…if you ever extend into the roof you now have the perfect wall to run stairs up’

‘Now strip my wallpaper and get some plasterers to tart me up – I want to be pretty again.’

I’m working on it house, I’m working on it.

Until next time~

Tab & The Fantabulous house.

Chronicles of the workroom war Part 3- Privacy, proper storage and moving in!

I have now officially moved into my workroom! When I left you last it was an empty shell, needing all the exciting things like curtains, storage and well…furniture. Here’s how I got it there.

(These photos happened before I painted the floor– continuity is an illusion!)

I went out and bought a bay window kit which is basically a pole with some cuts in it so normal humans can bend it.

Bending a metal pole made me feel like some kind of victorian strongman. Cheers house for helping me live my dreams.

To get the second bend I cut some slots further down the pole- wearing a face mask because flying bits of metal hot damn.

Pro tip: Don’t attempt to put one of these up yourself like I did, it’s a billion times easier with two people.

Eventually I got it up there, then I went to hang the curtains on…

…dammit.

That fancy corbel at the sides of the window had betrayed me and I had a whopping great big gap down the side of the curtain. The weight of the curtain was also pulling on the bay corner and it was all just one whopping great big mess. So I gave it a week to stew on what had gone wrong, then went out and bought a new set of poles.

I did look into getting a pole custom made…but that would take weeks and cost me an extra couple hundred pounds. That plus lack of privacy was driving me insane, so I decided to just see what I could do with a straight pole.

 

I learnt from my past mistakes and this one went up easy as pie. It even managed to line up where there was a hole in the coving from a past curtain pole- so that basically means it’s fate, right?

 

The curtain cuts off a bit of a bay window but as I was putting my drawing board there I didn’t mind so much.

Here’s the other side- not looking too bad! It only cost £40 and the curtains came free with the house. 😀

Now I just need to patch over the holes I made for the first attempt.

Next it was on to shelves! You lose a lot of storage space when you take out a wall so I decided to put build shelves in my two alcoves. All the wood came from the wardrobes I pulled out many months ago. 

I finally unpacked my kitchen table! We bought this years ago at a carboot for £5 and it’s definitely been worth the investment. Every time it gets a bit too scummy I just paint it again. It made a great work bench for cutting all the wood.

Spirit level is your friend. My walls are so wonky the only thing constant is the earth’s gravitational pull.

Marking holes- my pencil didn’t fit in here so a screwdriver did the job instead.

First set goes up to test the method.

Success!

I learnt from my last set of shelves to work from the top down- easier to get inside to screw the batons on and means the dust all ends up on the floor instead of on the previous layer of shelf.

The batons were just strips of the chipboard that I ripped with a circular saw. With the method for the top shelf proven to work I went on to do the rest of the shelves, cutting and labelling everything up at once to save time.

The other improvement on the last set of shelves I built in the red room was to use an actual SDS drill instead of a battery hand held. This thing goes though brick like a knife through toast- with a satisfying scrape.

Goggles because brick dust + eyes = manly blinding tears.

Holes drilled!

Siiighhh I just cleaned that floor.

 

 

Adjusting the shelves to fit exactly in place.

Yesss!

Yesssssss

Fans of Things Fitting Perfectly Into Things will appreciate this.

My next job was building a desk in the alcove near the window.

It was a weird shape so I put the spirit level across it and spent ages attempting to measure angles, drawing out over and over again…

…Before realising that I could just cut a piece of cardboard to fit and make a template. I do this all the time for costume making, so whooo transferable skills.

And lo a perfect desk!

Now to sob quietly and hoover up.

 

Another day’s worth of work putting shelves up. This time I cut the wood outside but nothing stops the plague that is brick dust.

This is a big ol’ piece of floor lino offcut I got for £30 on ebay- this year I’ve taken up a couple of dance classes and I need somewhere to practice tap where I won’t gouge out the floor. Here’s to surprisingly tasteful rainbow decor!

It was very useful for cutting out some white cotton fabric ready to finally get some extra window privacy.

I used some wallpaper paste left overs to just stick it to the window at half height- no more awkward eye contact with the people in the street!

After coating the fabric with wallpaper paste I used a pen to mark the edges, trimmed it to size with scissors and I’ve got a semi-permanent curtain that still lets lots of light into the room.

From the outside it looks a bit ‘GO AWAY’ but I prefer that to feeling like I’m working in a goldfish bowl all the time

The last part of the workroom was actually putting it to use and making a set of curtains for the double doors- these were made from the last curtain left over from the front window plus some matching chiffon to help get light in in the morning.

Then… I moved all my stuff in.

Then moved it.

And moved it again.

Until eventually I got this:

Strange how I spent 9 months working out of my bedroom and sewing in a tiny section of my living room but the moment I had the workroom to move into I couldn’t figure anything out. Just goes to show that art happens wherever it happens- you really don’t need a special place for it.

I got caught up in  ‘how would a normal human being make use of this space???’. But the thing is, I’m not trying to make a normal home here, this is my workroom, it’s got to work for me.

I realised that what I wanted was everything in the front room (computer, stock and work tables) and the back room a big open space for whatever I want to do. When friends visit I move the dining table out and make a big table down the middle, but this is how I use the space most of the time. I draw with the light coming in the window, I can get to stock and I have lots of work surface for laying out fabric on. There’s curtains hanging so I can divide the room up if I need to.

I’ve collected and made a lot of hats over the years so I used them for decoration as well as creating storage for them. There’s a cork board behind my computer for notes but also where I put up some portraits of fans I did for my last kickstarter. Their beautiful faces remind me that I should keep drawing whenever the times get tough.

(Please excuse the internet cable- turns out my computer refuses to find the WIFI despite being in the same room, possibly because there’s a steel beam blocking the magic internet rays. )

I’ve still got some boxes to sort out but I’m managing to keep things away from the radiator and (mostly) off the workbench.

All around the room I’ve put up my favourite costumes. I was worried these would clutter up the place but it’s a shame to wear something only a couple of times and then put them into storage where they’re rarely seen. I find it very hard to put my own art on the walls because like most artists I’m very self critical of my work, but costumes just remind me of the good times I’ve had in them.

Turns out the rainbow chandeliers are the perfect place to put my tape measures so I don’t lose them!

Then I went and had a birthday party, with all of these lovely people who made nice noises about my house.

The workroom still isn’t completely finished- I still have to put up a wall of mirrors, sort out the fireplace tiles and have one rather bizarre addition to make, but it’s doing it’s job as a workroom now. Now I just have to go do some work in it instead of ripping out some walls upstairs…

Until next time!

 

Xx Tab

Chronicles of the Workroom War Part 2- Fires, lights and colour!

I’m currently moving my stuff into the workroom- though the more I add the smaller it gets, which is crazy for such a large room! Anywhoooo now it’s time for the fun parts of decorating, adding back original details and adding colour!

This is the hole in the front room that we uncovered back in August along with some super sexy original tiles. 

I’m in an area that doesn’t allow smoke from fires so I decided to block the chimneys off and cover them up. As much as the idea of a roaring fire appeals to me most of the heat gets lost out the top of the house and this would be a room I was storing fabric in- smoke is a big no no. You sometimes get condensation issues on blocked chimney breasts so I stuffed some loft insulation up there and made sure I didn’t make it airtight.

My metal fire surround was slightly too big for the hole so some bricks had to be trimmed down. Sorry neighbours!

Yeah, this isn’t leaving any time soon- I had to hammer it into place. Perfect fit!

Then I rested the mantle surround (donated by my Dad) to check for fit.

There was some issue with gaps at the sides- I could have moved the pillars inwards but that meant losing more of the tile designs.

Instead I grabbed some trim from the old kitchen and cut two lengths to sit just inside the fire surround.

Success!

The next day I began work on the other fireplace in the room. This one had a different style of surround and no back guard so I used a piece of plasterboard to block it off as well as fibreglass stuffed into the chimney.

Marking off where the air vent was going to go as well as cutting a section out the bottom for the grate.

Here you can see how the fireplace was permenantly attached to the wall. I used a strip of wood above the metal surround with large washers to keep it from falling forward. To the sides were two other pieces of wood attached to the wall which sit just inside the sides of the fireplace. This way I could just screw into those instead of attempting to affix the fireplace directly to the wall.

And it’s even level!

The next step was painting trim and doors. Which means a lot of sanding.

While sanding the front room door I realised there was a cool pattern underneath

Check it out! I decided to not paint the insides of this door because it looks pretty damn cool.

Ew shelf cleaning.

Then shelf painting! My gawd such storage.

(You can see why painting the trim was really important. Yum.)

I used non drip oil based gloss for the trim in this room because I wanted it durable.

Turns out non drip means ‘can actually stand a paintbrush up in’

How to keep your internet wires away from the wet paint without unplugging anything and losing precious internet.

Now onto the super exciting RAINBOW CHANDELIER INSTALLATION. After my mistake in the kitchen I made sure to take a photo of the wiring layout before I moved any wires. I also made sure to turn off the lighting circuit at the breaker and had my friend Ruben come help me in case of accidental electrocution. STAY SAFE KIDS

Here’s Ruben holding one of the new ceiling roses like Captain America’s shield. I went with resin based roses for their durability and lightness which makes installation easier. They cost about the same as plaster ones.

No more nails won’t keep one of these on properly- to install them we had two of us on ladders, Ruben holding it in place and me screwing into the ceiling to make sure it wouldn’t fall down

Finishing off the last screw! I spent a long time picking these out- there were so many super swirly fancy ones that I was spoilt for choice. In the end got the largest I could get for £50 a rose in a classic style to match the coving and the scale of the room. Cheers ebay.

After much fiddling and swearing the chandeliers were wired up and BOOM lights!

SUCH TASTE

Turns out the super tacky chandeliers actually matched my windows quite well. It’s almost like they were MEANT TO BE

Around this time a bunch of my artists friends were posting ‘show us a picture of your workspace’ photos up on facebook. HAHAHAHA Jealous?

Now for the colouring to begin! I picked this colour yellow months ago to make a bright and cheery room. Fortunately for me I still liked it when I opened the tin! It’s dulux ‘Wild Primrose’

I’m a big fan of the trim first, then colour method. I can cut in edges but I do find tape works better for me, especially as my skirting boards are super wonky so need all the help they can get.

Fireplace covered to prevent drips and edges painted!

Whoooooo colour! This yellow was lovely and pale, I was super happy with it without it being overwhelming.

Yessss

Yesss good

In the end I did two coats over the course of two days and used three 2.5 litre tubs of paint to do it.

Then it was time to sweep out the room and start work on finishing the floor!

I hired a big drum sander to do the bulk of the floor before I began painting because DUSTY. The edges I finished off with a belt sander. I decided early on to paint the floor- as you can see my edges were almost jet black so I’d never get a good result from wood stain.

I had planned to paint the fireplaces black but I had so much green left over from the kitchen that I decided What the Hell and painted the fireplaces green too.

Hot damn that’s one nice looking fire!

And the other one to match. I think this suits the room much better than black ever would.

Now the scary part- painting the floor.

I went with ronseal dimond hard olive green because it looked like a nice bright colour to add light into the room. Also green.

I started painting at night just before bed- here you can see my last snack of the day to make sure I wouldn’t just have to sit upstairs and starve.

Night night floor

I woke up next morning to a room which looked like this.

Which I sort of… hated.

I kept describing it to my friends as ‘overly soothing doctor’s surgery’. I did two coats anyway then went away to minamicon, hoping to come back and just learn to live with it.

 

Then I came back and unloaded my car, only to discover that this was the worst colour floor ever for showing up footprints and NO I could not live with it.

(To give you an idea about twice a month I load about 20 boxes of stock into my car and trade at comic cons. This is what my stand looks like)

So all my stock had to move back into the kitchen, and I spent a good week trying to figure out what colour to paint the floor to make it less of a nightmare to keep looking clean.

 

In the end I found this stuff from a trade paint supplier. It’s acrylic based so wouldn’t smell out the house and fast drying so I wouldn’t be cut off from my kitchen for too long. It’s dark green because GREEN.

Scary first splash of green goes down.

SUCH GREEN

YESSS GREEN

Here’s the room after the first coat, already SO MUCH better. After chatting to my mum about the floor colour and how much I hated the lighter one for making everything look like toon town, we decided it must have been an issue with contrast.

Here’s a photo of the first olive green colour turned black and white- see how the floor looks almost exactly the same as the walls?

Here’s the floor after it’s first coat of green- almost like something out of a victorian photo. Sometimes we get so stuck on colour we forget to think about light and dark. Just something else to keep in mind when decorating!

Three coats and a couple of days later the floor is a gorgeous dark green. It doesn’t make the room as bright as the light olive did but light reflects off of it in a completely different way. It cost me £60 and an extra week to fix the workroom floor, but I’m very glad I did it.

This is me realising I blend in almost perfectly with my new floor. It’s almost like green is my favourite colour or something.

Now it’s time for finishing touches, curtains and actually moving into the damn workroom. Excitement!

Chronicles of the Workroom War- The Walls and Floor

I can’t believe it’s been 2 months since the kitchen was finished! I kept telling myself “I’ll update the blog when I finish the workroom, I’ll update the blog when I finish the workroom…” but tonight I sorted out some pictures and realised that the workroom ‘post’ was going to need to be split into several.

Though it’s no wonder looking at the floorplan:

For those of you who don’t know, I work from home and I’m tired of the room I spend most of my time in being a pokey little hole that Tab the drawing gremlin pushes comics out of. So I picked the biggest and prettiest room for me to work in, which could then change into a dining room if I host a party. In december I got a steel beam put in and a wall taken down, then it was time to see what the condition of the walls looked like under all that wallpaper…

I borrowed my friend Ben and we got to work duel wielding hot strippers.

Yep.

The filing cabinets made very good stepladders.

Anyone who thinks stripping wallpaper is a pleasant and clean job is a downright liar and you should send them photos of my blog.

Such loss.

Such devastation.

(The last owners left us a date to find in two places- 10/8/88! This wallpaper is older than meeeee)

Such carnage

Such is the life and death of wallpaper.

Here’s a full view of the room just before we cleaned up and made it look less like the battle of Hogwarts aftermath. I then had a fun couple of weeks attempting to find a plasterer I: a) liked b) cost a reasonable amount and c) wasn’t booked up for weeks in advance. Eventually I found one which yay, but also booooo time to take the radiators off the wall.

Draining a radiator isn’t particularly tricky, it just smells like the boiling metal of ancient water. I highly recommend using a fine serving tea tray to do it.

 

I also had to haul the floor up to make sure it was stable for the plasterers. I’d been noticing a bounce in the floor as I walked over the middle which was fortunately solved by whacking some bits of slate under the joists where they needed it.

The edges where the wall had once been was rotten and sad so I measured exactly 15 cm, set the circular saw to the correct depth and cut a strip ready for some new wood to go inside.

Temporary! Please do not stand on me! – I quickly got this down before the plasterers arrived the next day.

Then plasterers turned up and suddenly made things AMAZING

The radiator walls were the first to be done so I could get them connected back on as quickly as possible and help the room dry out.

I used to have two big holes from an old leak in the bay/cavity so I decided to get my ceiling completely boarded with pasterboard.

Unfortunately I lost a bit of the coving at the edges but that’s better than a ceiling falling in on you… which sometimes happens with old houses if you leave the lathe up.

The plasters had three guys working over a course of three days and finished the entire room in that time with an afternoon to spare. Jeeeeesusss there’s a reason I don’t bother to attempt plastering myself.

And lo, a room is born!

Now to dry the damn thing out.

While the plaster was drying I put down the new board in the centre and used the old pieces of skirting to finish off the edges properly. You can use a fancy mitre saw to do this but I just set my circular saw to 45 and got to it. The sawdust from the 100 year old wood smelt *delicious*, like super expensive barbecue.

Then with great resignation I moved all my stuff back into the (once beautiful) kitchen because it was time to sand the floor.

Dust sheets up everywhere. (Cheers for the curtains Mum- they came in handy!)

Doors open to get the dust out.

Let’s do this.

(I put a piece of plasterboard up in the window because I was tired of making awkward eye contact with everyone going past. I cannot WAIT for curtains)

Dust breather because DUST SO MUCH DUST, gloves in case something flies up and burns your flesh, overalls for the same reason, steel toe caps because DANGER,  sound protection because LOUD and visor because DUST AND DANGER.

Wearing all this kit is important, but it’s also like being in an isolation chamber. I spent several hours going crazy as my brain decided to talk to me about “that One Conversation you had that One Time and Oh, here’s a list of things you should have said that were far better than what you did”.

First pass going across the grain to make sure the worst of the bumps came out.

Second and third pass with finer paper

Finally I was free!

Things I learnt from sanding this time:

1. My floor is hella bumpy
2. A floor this size will take several back breaking hours, but then it will be DONE
3. Wear earbuds and listen to music next time, JESUS.
4. Local independent hire shops are basically half the price of brand stores (£60 this time instead of £100 from when I did the living room)
5. Hitting nails as you sand is always terrifying because it makes the sandpaper explode into shreds

With the sander returned the next job was to fill any awful holes I had found and make the place a bit more draught free. I used expanding foam for any really large bits under the skirting board, then trimmed it down and covered with filler.

For the floor I saved a bag of sawdust from the sander and mixed it with PVA to make some super tough (and cheap) wood filler.

Which then went in the worst of the cracks like this one.

Then it was time to tarp the floor because PAINTING was about to happen.

My dad lent me this paint spray gun which I was very excited about for using for the mist coat. The mist coat is a watered down paint job in cheap white emulsion because fresh plaster absorbs a lot of liquid.

Finally my hovel is complete!

(Masking the windows off so I don’t spray paint all over them)

Masking off the french doors

The spray gun comes with a little funnel that you use to time how long the paint takes to go through and dilute accordingly.

I was SO EXCITED to use this spray gun, it was going to be so AWE-

Oh.

WELL.

I couldn’t get it to work for the life of me- and this room needed to be painted, so it was time to break out the roller on a stick and get to it!

TO BATTLE!

(At this point I started going stir crazy and cataloguing my decent into madness in picture form. The ceiling took four coats of white over the course of two days, all of it shoulder destroying work as paint rained down from the ceiling onto my face. I abandoned my shirt after the first hour)

PAINT FOR THE PAINT GOD

WE SHALL RIDE INTO VALHALLA WHITE SPECKLED AND SWEATY

…This is basically how I spent the last two months. It might have been because the time of year or how exhausting all the work was but I really hit a burnout when it came to the sanding and painting. It seems ridiculous as I knew the worst was over and I was SO CLOSE to Real Life House(tm), but it took most of my mental energy to get downstairs and do work. Just goes to show- starting a project and ripping things out is easy, struggling through the middle and finishing things off is not.

Tune in next time as we move onto the finishing off of things- Because it’s time for the workroom to get COLOURFUL.

The kitchen round up!

Before

Back when I got the keys in July 2015:

  

 

Several months of posts later:

Tiles gone Wild!

Kitchen Wrecking, Reckoning and Rewiring

The Kitchen Worktop Question

The Door Detour

Kitchen plastering, painting and plants

And the kitchen sink

Painting the cabinets Garish Green

Christmas eve cutting, boxing day building

Finishin’ the Kitchen 

After

My kitchen, as of January 2016

The original bottom cupboards have been kept and repainted, everything else is newly installed and either Ikea or DIY built.

It’s first and foremost a working kitchen, so I chose an easy to clean electric cooker, cupboards that you can easily see into, oak worktop that could take a beating and an implements rack to have everything close to hand.

(Try to ignore the bottle of white spirits on the window ledge, it’s practically a permanent fixture now)

My first ever dishwasher! Also recycling bins under the sink in full view because I like having instant access.

Close up of the tiles and the plant I haven’t killed yet.

The lights are simple green metal pendants. The doors to under the stairs and my (soon to be) workroom have the original green paint I found under the board covering them on the panels and I just painted up the edges.

Here’s the sorry state of my tool cupboard. This is something I don’t expect to change much for the next forever.

And one last quick comparison side by side. Such a difference!

…Now to get to work on this room.

Finishin’ the Kitchen

The kitchen is officially finished! This post is about the building of the fridge cupboard, the splashback tiles, the floor tiles and the last few finishing touches

I added some trim to the top of the cupboard that I built with my mother over christmas

Then everything got painted white, all white! I felt a bit like this guy:

This weird nub is the reason why I couldn’t just buy a normal cupboard and install it in there.

Now it was time to get some doors on this baby.

I discovered on my last painting mission that it’s much easier to give all the doors little table legs out of screws and that way I can do a coat of all the sides at once.

The BIN comes out again to give it a decent base layer.

Then onward with the green!

(I eventually took my christmas decorations down)

 

I also use this time to touch up all the bits of cupboard that had been bashed or missed during the first painting.

When the doors were all dry I popped the fridge doors on, only to find that the top fridge door scraped on the bottom green door.

I contemplated moving the hinges up and faffing about but it was solved very quickly by shoving a shim underneath the fridge foot and leaving it at that.

There was a gap running down the one side of the cupboard so I bought a piece of pine strip wood, screwed it to the cupboard and then closed the door to see where I needed to cut it down.

Then I cut it to size with a circular saw.

Then I trimmed some of the old cupboard wood down ready for the kickstand to be installed.

Last job on the fridge was cutting these strips from the blinds to use as a catch and slider.

Then much building of ikea thingies!

(Screwing drawer rollers into cupboards smaller than you are wide is difficult, okay?)

Yay drawers!

(Unfortunately there were some casualties in installation so I had to repaint the bottom drawer)

Painting and repainting, that’s mah job!

I got these handles from the inbuilt wardrobes that were around the house, then made a jig so I wouldn’t put them on wonky.

This is how you use a drill, right?

 

 

I then spent several hours of my life making these the right width for a basket to sit in.

(Totally worth it to give my potatoes a house)

Fridge cupboard finished- it was time to move on to exciting tiling!

 

I had first thought I’d use these random batik tiles in the bathroom, but after getting a better feel for the kitchen I decided I wanted a light coloured spashback and bought a box each of grey, black, cream and green.

I then spent a rather long time figuring out what pattern I wanted to use. In the end I went with diagonals of the same colour while attempting to have no tile touching it’s pattern on an adjacent side. Making something look random is hard!

The mixing bucket and tools come out and I get tiling!

I bought a diamond tile cutter for £30 when I did my bathroom- totally worth the money, there’s no point hiring one when they’re so cheap.

Eventually I learnt how to just tile the pattern as I went, but at first I would lay it all out and double check before going ahead.

The cooker sits a bit lower than the worktop so this is how I filled the gap while the adhesive set. PROFESSIONAL.

One side- DONE.

Aw yisss, exactly fitting 3 tiles on this wall. These are the things dreams are made of.

Working my way along.

I gave up attempting to fit adhesive under the window sill and just splodged it on the tiles. At this point is was getting towards 9 at night so I sent my neighbours an apology text for all the noise the cutter was making. Turns out she couldn’t hear a thing which was grand for me as I didn’t want to start again in the morning and have to mix up a new batch of adhesive.

Last tile goes in! Ahhhhh.

A couple days later I do the whole grouting thing.

Yay tiles! As a finishing touch I ran a bead of clear silicone all down the edge and along the sink.

Urrrg, clean sides, dirty sink, story of my life.

Now for some little paint jobs before the floor went in. The radiator got tarted up a bit with some white spray.

And I once again delved deep behind the random door panelling, and discovered this underneath:

Check it out! This paint was a really nice colour so I decided to just leave it and paint the edges, leaving a bit of the history behind.

 

The other door was the same colour underneath so they even match!

With the messiest of the kitchen work out the way I ripped out the old lino and began to lay the new lino. I hate how cold ceramic floor tiles are so while lino looks cheaper I wouldn’t pick a different option.

I had the leftovers of the underlay from the bathroom so I just used the rest of that in the kitchen.

These are 5mm vinyl floor tiles from the Kimpton Floor company. I decided to go with a green stone colour effect to make up for not having stone worktops and lay them in a diagonal pattern because, well, I thought it would look cooler.

It did however make edges a lot more difficult.

I started out scoring with a knife and snapping the tiles but eventually had to give up and just use a jigsaw.

Finishing off all the edges…

Securing the tiles to the steps under the stairs so they’re not a trip hazard…

(The iron dutch oven came in handy for weighing down corners)

After waiting for the floor to dry (and removing all the debris) it was time to add the kickstand. I saved most of the original kickstand from the previous kitchen so I just trimmed those boards to fit and made the rest from scrap chipboard.

Most of the kickstand was 14cm high so I used the circular saw to run off several lengths.

Some glue and a screw or two later and I had a lovely continuous kickstand to go with my new floor.

Then the pièce de résistance, the pot and pan rack made with wardrobe hangers and the old copper pipe we cut from under the bath.

I’m going to hang so much stuff on there, oooooh yeah.

Now I just have to wait until it’s sunny, take some pictures of the finished kitchen, and I’ll post a round up with before and afters! Until then 😀

 

Fireplace the Second…

Hey, do you remember these?

Back when I got the keys in July (arrrg, it’s been so long since then D:) these wonderful tributes to the not so distant past stood boldly in the sitting room and dining room. Fire surrounds with square tiles were popular in the 50s with the thin vertical ones making their way in the 60s,  so these weird hybrids I can only guess at.

Back in august Karen helped me rip the front sitting room fireplace out, and we found some pretty special original tiles inside:

I’ve got a build date of approximately 1899, making this house barely victorian. You can see the beginnings of art nouveau influence in these which is about all over the house.

I had a spare evening to myself, so it was time to take out the second fireplace, and see what treasures lurked within..

First find was this pencil. Makeshift shim or lost relic? WE SHALL NEVER KNOW.

The last fire was easy to crow away from the wall, but this one was firmly fixed in place. As I was on my own (and the last one was too heavy for two people to lift, let alone one small ginger person) this fireplace was going to come out in pieces.

My hard hat has a visor which was important to prevent the shards of tiles hitting me in the face.

DIYBDBAI- Do it yourself but don’t be an idiot.

Timber! Good thing my neighbours are still on holiday…

There were a couple of iron ties holding it into place which I attempted to saw off but soon realised it was quicker to just hit it all with a hammer until the concrete holding it broke away. I then smashed up the fire and pulled it away, eager to get to the fire underneath.

THE GRATES OF HELL. I mean woah, better use my camera flash for this one.

That’s better.

Some more smashing and I got the bottom section broken up enough to move. It was made of some kind of concrete with metal strips running through it which makes me wonder whether it was premade and dragged in by very strong people, or if they assembled it onsite.

The old grate had some kind of lever system inside and on further inspection this old ash bucket. It also had some water in there under a layer of soot which was creepy as hell to poke and watch wobble.

Unfortunately there were no magical tiles under this one, just the remains of a big slate. This leads me to believe that this was originally the kitchen fire- something practical for cooking while the other room was the fancy one for visitors. I shall rack my brain thinking of how to make this one fancy, possibly something using the old broken tiles we found in the other fireplace:

It’s like a museum exhibit! 😀

Righto, time to clean up all this soot,  get rid of this lot of rubble, then it’s on to stripping the wallpaper.

And one day the underneath of my nails will be clean again, but today is not this day.

Tiny Bathroom, Huge Tiles and Small Victories

Only a crazy person would redo their bathroom and kitchen at the same time, but I’m that kind of crazy. So much of house renovations is juggling what you can do all at once, giving yourself drying time or waiting for things to arrive, so it’s not often a day will go by when I’m not doing at least something.

To give you an idea the start of this post began in november, so here is 2 months worth of bathroom.

Ready?

Here we go!

This post once again features the mighty Karen, a very tall woman who is very helpful when it comes to stripping wallpaper off high ceilings and pulling weird pipes out of walls.

A relic of the elderly couple that owned the house before me.

Textured wallpaper in a bathroom. Just don’t. This is the filth that was behind the mirror when I took it down.

Just a reminder, you can read about the making of the cabinet sink here and the plumbing of the new bath here. 

Goodbye old wallpaper!

How do you stop a stepladder from scratching your new bath? Just give it shoes of course!

Some historical wallpaper finds. So much tasteful history, yeah?  

Here’s the bare, sad walls that were underneath. Sometimes I see tutorials on pintrest on making faux exposed brick walls for ‘that rustic charm’ and I just laugh and laugh to stop the crying.

During the bathroom overhaul all of my toiletries lived in this box and would dutifully be packed away and taken outside for work, then returned once the room was swept out and the tub scrubbed. I learnt from getting the extractor fan drilled that dust covered toilet roll is particularly unpleasant.

This is the old attic hatch which watched me bathe for several days while waiting for the plasterers.

Fortunately for me none of this wobbly looking ceiling came crashing down on my head. I spent a week having super quick showers because I didn’t want to linger just in case.

 

One of the jobs before the plasterers arrived was to remove all the weird tubes coming out the wall that once led to the water tank.

(Do you ever try to take a picture on your phone and it’s accidentally in selfie mode?)

Whoooo expanding foam! Helping my house have 50% less holes since 2015.

 

Once it was set I trimmed that down, ready for the plastering to begin!

My ceilings are all old lathe ones, which you can get re-skimmed but it’s just cheaper, easier and safer to get some nice professionals to board them over with plasterboard.

 

I nabbed some photos while they were having a tea break- a job like this only takes two tradesmen a single day if they know what they’re doing. I managed to get this done for £320, which would have been £330 but I think the guy felt sorry for me.

Whoooo ghost bathroom! I was worried about plaster going EVERYWHERE over my new shiny taps and sink, but I picked these guys because the reviews said they were very clean and tidy on mybuilder.com (which is a smashing tool for anyone looking to get work done).

And done! The tiles I left because I’ll be boxing all the pipework in, but these walls haven’t been this flat in several decades, if ever.

My new de-humidifier gets to work drying the room out and the lamp of shame returns while I wait for the plaster to dry out enough to put the overhead light back in.

 

You know what’s awkward to paint? Tall ceilings over a bath.

I used a roller for most of it, but this ingenious life hack will blow your mind.

(It’s easier to scrub paint off this type of light than it is to mask it. Probably)

Even the radiator got tarted up a bit! This stuff is great by the way, one can does about 3 medium radiators.

Now it was time to focus on the awesome secret door that was masquerading as one of my bathroom walls.

Some of the paint was very bubbly so I used stripped to get off what I could.

Then the wallpaper stripper to get off the random bits of wallpaper that was on there.

Mmm, festive.

Time to make a statement piece out of it!

Awww yisssss

Next job was tiling the damn thing.

Tiles and tile adhesive is heavy yo. I got most of it as far as the kitchen and then gave up, only moving it upstairs when I needed it.

 

I bought a cheap diamond cutter because I knew I had some weird cuts to make, and began my journey into tiling for the first time.

I bought slow set adhesive which was a very smart decision.

 

Here we go!

Here’s where things started to get…interesting. I levelled out the bath as best as I could and used it as the initial straight line. However every time I stepped in and out of the bath the corner moved and eventually I just kinda jammed tools along the bottom edge to keep things level. Turns out when tile adhesive says ‘good initial grab’ it doesn’t mean ‘will stay where you put it’, but more ‘won’t fall off but will move about as much as it damn well likes’. It didn’t help that I was using ginormous 60x30cm tiles.

 

Everyone on the internet is using subway tiles right now, but I’ve always loved large vertical tiles for a more clean look, and well, less effort. However I did want something a little victorian to help the house tie together, so I got some of these victorian border tiles to go along under the window. This one line of border costs me more than all the large black tiles put together- tiles are expensive yo!

I found the best way to cut the border tiles was to turn it upside down and go through the back. Cutting tiles was surprisingly easy, if you ignore how messy, noisy and scary it is to work with a whirring blade chucking water at you at high speed.

At this point I *tried* to continue tiling above the border, but the weight of the large tiles squashed the delicate smaller ones, so I had to yank them all off, scrape the wall down and start again the next day. Good thing I bought two bags of adhesive!

 

The next day the border tiles were set enough to continue, so onward!

Even after being replastered the bathroom walls were wonky as hell. My advice to anyone tiling an old house is to use smaller tiles than I did- I had a lot of trouble with corners poking up where the tiles went over large bumps.

The last tile cut! Here you can truly see the wonky nature of my house.

In it goes! First ever tiling attempt DONE. I don’t know how clean real tilers can do things, but my tiles looked like I had a fight with a mud man.

Here’s what my workspace looked like. I started out with the cutter on top of the toilet but the sheer size of my tiles made it impossible to balance on there properly. So much adhesive and gunk everywhere…

(Did I mention I was tiling the bathroom the same week as the wall knock through? In for a penny, in for a pound, might as well make the entire house a dust filled hole all at the same time)

(This was the pink kettle the builders brought on site. I was not ready for the 10am discussion on gender masculinity norms, but just goes to show that people surprise you!)

 

 

Then the fun bit- scrubbing the adhesive off before it set!

I was so happy with the results- while it is a big wall of black it’s actually very cosy and not to mention very striking.

I waited the standard 24 hours for the adhesive to dry, then it was time to learn about grouting. I found it was easiest to use a trowel and a float to get the grout in the seams, then use the float to spread it all over.

MY BEAUTIFUL CREATION

Almost as soon as the grout was all finished I began washing it down. My mum has had a lot of trouble with grout film on tiles in the past, so I knew that you had to get that stuff off QUICK if you didn’t want to spend the rest of your life scraping at it.

I gave the tiles 3 wash downs with water before using an old scrappy towel to dry it and get the last of the residue off.

😀

When the tiles were all dry a couple of days later I siliconed the edges of the bath and down the corner of the wall, using the classic trick of filling up the bath with water to make sure it was weighed down properly. The next night I had the best bath of my life while staring up at my beautiful tiles, attempting to sooth the aches that 3 days of tiling had wrought on my body.

Now it was time to think about flooring. I’m a big fan of industrial vinyl tiles which unlike the horrible thin ones you get in B&Q, are 2-3mm thick and come in all kinds of colours. I got mine from Kimpton Flooring which is nothing to do with me commercially, despite sharing my name! They’re a company in Wales that is the kind of place you call up with an order, so I did the awkward ‘haha my name’s Kimpton too’ on the phone.

I briefly check a layout for the tiles before any underlay or glue gets involved. I decided to rotate my tiles every other one because it looked weird with all the pattern going the same way.

Good bye gross floor!

I used the ikea floor underlay because I just happened to be buying other stuff in ikea. It was nuisance to deal with though and whoever decided to make it bright green was a horrible person as it showed up slightly through the tiles.

It begins!

I’ve used tiles like this in my last house so we’re old friends. You can just cut into the back with a blade and snap them or even use scissors if you have strong enough hands.

Perfect fit!

For more tricky sections I used scrap paper to take a template and transferred it over.

Especially around radiator parts.

The tiles then get an assortment of tools laid over the corners to hold them down, and I have a new beautiful floor!

Next step is the dreaded bath panel. There’s a history in my family of bath panels being the trickiest part of a bathroom to figure out, you merely need to mention one near my mother to have her scoff and grumble. But with christmas fast approaching I wanted the bath sorted, and there’s just something particularly scummy and depressing about an exposed bath with pipework.

As well as adding clips to the underneath of the bath I drilled two blocks of wood into the walls in the corner to give it extra support.

Getting this into the corner was a nightmare, there was barely enough room for me to squeeze in.

Then some corner cutting for the pipework. You have to cut panels like this with a jigsaw which is hilarious to manoeuvre in such a tiny bathroom.

A couple of back and forths as I had to make the corner cut larger, but suddenly the bath panel just slotted into place and the family curse of difficult panels was finally broken!

(However my next job was fitting this custom mirror into the bathroom cabinet and that took me HOURS to get right. I ended up giving up and using triangles of floor tiles to hold it in. Just goes to show that it’s always the random weird stuff that takes the most time, not the things you expect.)

For the cabinet I did a couple of google searches about wall mounting heavy things and came across this great idea where you use two pieces of wood with a mitred 45 degree edge to create a hook/rail support on the back.

The other bit gets mounted properly into the wall with plugs and huge screws, and I added a bottom piece to make it stand away from the wall.

And lo, a cabinet goes on the wall with absolutely no fuss! I then used some more screws to secure the cabinet inside to the wood rail, but that sucker isn’t coming off any time soon.

Siiiigh, brick dust though. My eternal nemesis.

The last job was putting up a shower rail, in my case a brass curtain rail because I like things fancy, and a brass shower holder that I got off ebay. Then I took my FIRST EVER PROPER SHOWER in the fantabulous house. No more awkwardly sitting in the tub holding the hose above my head, no sirreee.

Then a towel rail and some hooks from Home Sense (the home version of TK max) and it was starting to look like an actual bathroom.

The last thing to do in here is to box in around the tiles and pipes, but beyond that I’m basically done!

Until then I can appreciate my new, beautifully white ceiling with 100% less holes.

And for the first time since moving into this house, a lock on the bathroom door. Truly, this is living the life.

Until next time!

Christmas Eve Cutting, Boxing Day Building

Hope you all had a lovely holidays! Here at the fantabulous house the I only really took the day off on the 25th as my mother was visiting The North, so I put her hands to good work on a couple of fiddly jobs that I couldn’t do alone.  Well, I probably could, but not without things falling on my head.

ANYWAY.

This desolate square is my small kitchen window. I bought some blinds because I was tired of awkwardly not making eye contact with my next door neighbour as we both washed up.

Before I’d always just bought blinds too small for the window and just dealt with the gaps, but now I had THE TOOLS, so I decided to buy them bigger and cut them to fit.

You can use a hacksaw on these, but two cuts with a chop saw was so much cooler.

Sanding the edges, making it all nice.

Look at all the shims I have! I’ll never have wonky furniture again! 😀

There was a lot of drilling with the SDS drill and faffing about but soon it was airborne!

My mother demonstrating her high flying skills.

And because I’m that kind of guy we also removed the bottom slats to adjust it to the right length of the window. These came in handy much later for the fridge door, very glad I did it!

Here’s the other side up and looking lovely.

 

What wasn’t lovely was the contents of my washing up bowl and all the damn plants on the sill. CLEAR YOUR WORKSPACE before starting a job. Don’t be Tab and Harriet.

(The reason there was so much washing up was because these little jobs were being done while waiting for each layer of the Trifle Gay Christmas Pudding to set. Red raspberry cream, orange jelly and segments, yellow custard, green lime jelly, blue raspberry panecotta, purple black currant jelly with blueberries and pink raspberry cream if you’re curious.)

Next job was constructing a door to go over the boiler cupboard. The problem with cupboard hinges is that they need that little circle cut into the door to work properly, and I was using two doors slung up on their side. The solution was to use the two fake drawers that were meant to go under sink cupboard as supports and go at it with a drill and a jig saw until a relatively circular hole emerged.

These were then screwed onto the back of the two doors, making a giant H for Harriet.

Then amazingly it just lined up, no fuss. Whooooo onward to Christmas!

(This is my mum enjoying the remains of the brandy, I mean triffle on christmas evening.)

This year we had a visit from one of Santa’s leak making elves. While watching Inside Out, my tears streaming down my face like the rain outside, some of the rain decided to get into the house and share my joy. It announced it’s presence with a tremendous crash downstairs, which was not someone trying to steal my totally awesome tree.

(Seriously this was the best tree)

 

This had to have a bucket under it until the new year when roofers finally opened again after the holidays and I could get it fixed.

Boxing day dawned bright and early with the building of an ikea cupboard base.

This is where the fridge will eventually go, but it needs a nice custom built cupboard for it. I did look vaguely into ikea built ins, but ikea doesn’t like non- ikea fridges so we were going to have to do it ourselves.

Fortunately I’ve saved all the good chipboard from all the wardrobes I’ve torn down around the house, but this thing took an entire day to figure out.

It didn’t help that the walls were wonky as a playdoh mansion. Here’s mum chipping off some plaster because it was easier to do that than to cut the ikea unit down…

Slowly a cupboard emerges!

We managed to get a combination of ikea and the recycled old doors to make the right height for the fridge.

Ikea hinges hate going on anything that isn’t ikea chipboard. These did NOT want to go on, so we MADE them.

Making shelves out of the scrap chipboard. From this angle the cupboard looks square, I can tell you this is a terrible trapezium-shaped lie.

(Here are some of the measurements so you can see exactly how wonky we’re talking. A whole inch in places!)

After much struggling we get the fridge in with the help of my sack truck. Now the fridge can never leave! The doors all came off at this point because they needed to go away and be made pretty.

Here’s all the doors laid out so you can see how they *nearly* all matched perfectly. Not bad for something that came from two completely different companies!

I’d started to run out of the door handles from the original kitchen (recycling, it starts at home! Also, FREE) but luckily for me all the wardrobes I tore out had some pretty swanky handles.  Can’t wait to get these doors painted up and thrown up there! 😀

As a thank you to my mum for all her help I then took her to the Whitworth Art Gallery in manchester which had a super cool exhibit on textile artwork- check it out if you’re nearby.

Happy New Year from Tab and Harriet at the Fantabulous house!