The other bedroom

It’s been a bit quiet over the last couple of weeks as Klaus has been busy working on a his proper job and to be fair he is the main driving force behind much of the work done on the house.

However I have got round to taking some photos of our bedroom. Like the other room it’s not finished and what you don’t see in these shots are all our clothes on rails but it’s a step in the right direction. 

You can get a sense of the rail effect from this picture taken the weekend we moved in (this is the bed we later moved into the other bedroom). It’s a bit neater now.

We chose a new quite neutral wall colour. I normally prefer more colour but we had a headboard that I made for our previous house we wanted to use again and this colour worked best with that and the fireplace. The colour is elephants breath by Farrow and Ball. Probably the best name ever for a paint.

The colour looks really different from one of these shots to the next . In the morning light it’s quite varied as well with one wall looking cool and the other much warmer. I like that.

We’ve kept the existing curtains, but we weren’t too keen on the pattern and just for now we have simply turned them round so we are actually living with the lining.

The floor boards in here are painting the same colour all across the top flor and into the other bedroom. I used the same colour to update an old mirror we had steadily fallen out of love with. Klaus claimed it was “too 1990’s”.  Here it is just before I took my paintbrush to it in rather a pretentious photo which has Klaus’ piano in the relfection

And here it is afterwards back in the bedroom.

These fireplaces in the bedroom are really polarizing. Some people love them and some literally hate them. We can’t afford to change them at the moment anyway, but I am starting to come down on the side of love.

Little details

A small update.

I’ve been doing a little sale shopping for those small finishing touches that can be hard to find when you need them and pricey. A few of my finds have been used already and the others I am hoarding as they wait for their moment.

The Graham and Green warehouse sale was the source for some bathroom accessories. We put a small sink in the spare bedroom for guests as being on the top floor we thought it might seem a bit of a trek to the bathroom even though it’s only down one level. We already pleased we did as we were sleeping in their while our room was worked on and it was really useful.

Here is just one example.

This comes from their Fleur de Lys range which is still on sale.

Then from Anthropologie I bought all these door knobs all for just a pound or so each. These have no particular purpose as yet but will be useful to add a bit of interest to our furniture.

I’ll upload some shots once we have fitted some of these.

How we’re living now

We’re workmen free at the moment and Klaus is busy preparing for a show which means not much work is happening on the house. However on the plus side since things have settled down a bit we do have a chance to get all the rooms a bit tidy and as functional as possible. 

The front room has a kind of working kitchen. Our last kitchen was mainly free-standing and so we had some bits and pieces to bring with us like the plate rack. The sink was upstairs in the original kitchen (now part of the bathroom) and so we have just moved it downstairs for the time being.  

You can see where we have just roughly painted some sections behind shelves to make it easier when we paint this room properly. It’s all pigeon from Farrow and Ball as we plan to use that throughout this room. 

I’ve got a few paintings I have been working on in this shot. Slightly surprisingly I was letting the first rough stage dry on the oven top, the oven wasn’t on of course. It was just the only place to keep them out of harms way at the time. 

I have been using the other end of the room as a temporary studio space. We’ve had the internal doors partly closed to give me a bit of privacy. 

This is the view back from my studio area.  

The light in the front of the picture I really don’t like, the one at the other end of the room we brought with us from the old house. It’s really intended for the hall but it looks OK where it is for now. 

In this next photo we are in the hall facing into the kitchen. The red mop and bucket makes an entrance in all these shots. That wasn’t intentional but given the general level of work needed I’m not sure these styling lapses really matter.

Outside this room and on the landing you can see that we’ve stripped back much of the wallpaper but left the carpet down for now. 

And upstairs is the sitting room. We have done nothing to this room apart from take up the carpet so we could get the central heating plumbed in, put in radiators and some of our furniture. I know the settee needs upholstering but I kind of like it like this. 

When we were decorating our last house which to be fair was a much smaller job than this one of the most annoying things was moving boxes and furniture from room to room. This time we have the luxury of the basement which is where we are keeping as much as we can out of the way for now. And here they all are. 

Wash Day

We now have a functioning bathroom . Whilst the room itself is awaiting flooring, plastering, tiles, paint etc we have the brand new bath in and it’s working well.  

This bath comes from Aston Matthews and is extremely heavy. The underneath is left so you can paint it yourself and we’re yet to decide what colour to go with. We also need to buy some taps as these are a temporary measure where we have taken the taps off the old bath we removed.

Our amazing eBay purchased loo and sink have also been fitted and are working well.

 

99p sink

 

The shower plumbing has been put in place.  The tray, screen and tiles have been bought and are sitting downstairs and are all yet to be fitted. So it’s baths all round at the moment which is a bit decadent. It’s also a bit racy as we haven’t sorted out a blind yet for the window. That’s next on the list.

This room was actually two rooms when we first moved in and in this photo you can just see the door we have boarded up in the back right hand part of the room. This was previously access to a galley kitchen which you reached from the sitting room. 

The utility cupboard has now been enclosed and the washing machine fitted so we can finally do our washing at home again – many thanks to everyone who has let us come round to dinner with a bag of washing in recent weeks. We’d be much grubbier without you. 

The floor is in need of some serious attention. We haven’t even finished taking out all the nails as yet as you can see from this shot.

We’re currently undecided whether to keep the floorboards or have a different type of flooring. I’m keen on a black and which checkerboard look but we are living with it for the moment while we make up our minds and check out prices.

More quirky wallpaper

The August issue of Living Etc has some wallpaper that has caught my eye and is a bit similar to some designs I have posted here already. 

It seems a bit of a trend to have wallpaper that creates the illusion you have objects against the wall. I quite like it although I’m not sure how it works when you want to add shelves with real objects on them. Could get a bit messy. This paper is from Catkin Collection

Also from Catkin Collection is this bird house wallpaper. I think I actually prefer this one.

We’re not really at the wallpaper stage yet but these certainly go onto the list of possibilities.

A busy weekend

First up is the bathroom. We have a new roll top bath ordered, paid for and arriving tomorrow. The shower screen and tray have arrived and we went out and bought some simple tiles. We’ve also started the process of building the utility cupboard which goes in the corner of this room. The new washing machine is sitting next to it ready to be slotted in. Plus plasterboard has gone on the ceiling.

We were however still missing a sink (and a loo). Everything we saw in the showrooms we either hated or was extremely expensive so we decided to check eBay. At the pub on Friday night using their wifi we found a very nice sink not too far away and about to end. It had no bidders apart from us so we picked that up for 99p, incredible. Then we noticed that the seller had other items, a complete bathroom suite in fact all of which was about to end. Since we were going to their house anyway we bought their loo, shower attachment (which we are hanging onto for the basement bathroom) and another bath. The second bath we thought we’d keep for the taps as they are so expensive and find a new home for the bath.

Here’s the loo arriving.

So that’s a very good condition bathroom suite for £7.48.

We left the bath out front as it was heavy and before we had the chance to take the taps off (which were ok but not too great) some very strong beachcomber came past and took it away. To be fair when this normally happens we’re pleased as we deliberately leave items we don’t need out front for poeple to take, but in this instance it was a bit swifter than expected.  I think we owned the bath for two hours maybe three. Nevermind.

On the way back to London from collecting our loot we swung past the Graham and Green warehouse sale in Chiswick and bought some small bits and bobs. It’s worth checking out particularly for furniture. It happens about twice a year and everything is at least 50% off.

The other room which has had a bit of attention is the back bedroom. This is how it used to look.

And here it is now. It’s not totally complete but a quick facelift.

This is Chinese Blue from Farrow and Ball and the orginal curtains.

But unfortunately the view back onto the landing shows the general state of mayhem.

This room and a few of the others have boards that can’t be put back down. Either they are too fragile or they have been cut but not across the beam so they are impossible to repair. So we went to the reclamation yard and bought some  new/old boards.

Some other treasures at the reclamation yard. These are taken on my phone so not great quality shots.

The boards are now in the house waiting to be fitted.

So still lots and lots to do.

Irish Inspiration

Last weekend I went with Sara on a long weekend to visit our friend of Gin and Crumpets  fame who is studying at the famous cookery school.

While there we visited the exceptionally lovely school gardens and since we’re in the throes of planning our garden I took some shots as inspiration.

Mrs Scarecrow

Mr Scarecrow

I loved the colour contrasts in this shot, particularly the flowers against the red of the hedge.

Klaus is a big fan of the box hedging so this is always interesting to see.

Subtle planting on steps

 

And while we were there we also paid a visit to Lismore Castle and walked around the gardens there. At this point I realise it sounds as though we released our inner Little Old Ladies – we did do lots of fun youthful things as well. Promise.

As we’ve mentioned here before we’re going to try to grow some roses in our new garden to go with the one plant valiantly growing there already. So here come some shots of roses.

Rows of sweet peas mixed in with the vegetable garden.

And then wide English Country Cottage style boarders.

All a bit grand for us and on an enormous scale but maybe we can create a bit of this in South East London.

Some signs of change

We seem to have finally reached a point where we are adding rather than subtracting from our house. We’ve been busy painting the walls and floors on the top floor to get the bedrooms looking better if not perfect (pictures to follow), Klaus and his brother have been putting up plasterboard in the hall, and all the radiators have arrived

which means once they are all fitted the floorboards can all go back down. We have so many odd boards propped up all over the place that will be a relief.

We have invested in a few stylish radiators in places where they will be on show and more functional ones where they will be obscured.  Once they are fitted we’ll not want to take them down again in a hurry to paint behind so that has meant we have been forced to make some colour decisions. Much of the work on the house feels like this, slowly slowly then suddenly we need to make instant, binding decisions.

In the kitchen we have two windows that are at the front of the house with panelling and shutters. When we first looked viewed the house in deepest darkest January this was one of the things we thought about changing that made us want to go for it. We thought at the time we’d go for Pigeon by Farrow and Ball but we tried another just to be sure. This is Pavilion Grey along side Pigeon.

But Pigeon was the winner. We’re planning to do much of the woodwork and walls in this colour perhaps adding in another colour if the overall effect is too dark as this will run throughout the room to the area where the kitchen units will actually be. One day. In the future. We hope.

Here are some tester shots of the colour plus radiators to get the idea.

 

 

 And at the other end of the room the fireplace has finally been knocked out to allow the oven to slot inside. This was much more trouble than we expected but it’s done now and we are pleased with the results so far.

On the other side of the room these are the rather limited facilities we are functioning with at the moment. It’s cobbled together from freestanding parts of our old kitchen and the sink that was upstairs in the orginal kitchen.

So it may not seem like much but to us it’s the first glimmer that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Adding to the wish list

I’ve been doing a bit of research into interesting wallpapers as I’d like to some in this house and ideally something a bit quirky or unusual.

I’d seen designs by Timorous Beasties before and decided to pay their shop in London a visit (they are originally a design duo from Glasgow). I’m a big fan of their Toile Collection and if I could have only one thing from them it would be this.

And this design a close second.

They look familiar but on closer inspection the designs are quite unexpected. But at £100 a roll it’s only ever going to be on a small space.

They also do extra wide format printing which allows them to have a larger design.

Then another company that was recommended to me is Deborah Bowness. These are my favourites.

With the books being top of my list.

garden design

Our poor front garden is full of bagged up building debris at the moment. Not great for first impressions and we do find quite a few people scavenging out front for treasures we may have mistakenly thrown away. Including some copper pipes Klaus has been hoarding.

Given the level of work we have to do I think it will be some time before we can give this garden much attention as we kind of need the space for all these important blue sacks.

view from sitting room window

The back garden is however tempting us to get started even though we should really be working on the interior. It’s pretty much a blank canvas and because it’s so long needs a bit of thought in terms of design.

the garden plus a glimpse of scaffolding

We’re going to reduce the size of the current patio. You actually can’t see all of it in this photo there’s another table and chairs out of shot, it looks a bit like a cafe right now.

For his birthday I bought Klaus a croquet set and he’s keen to keep a large section of lawn to play on. We’re also keen to leave some room for a garden studio. I had one in our old house and it was really useful.

garden office when new at our old house

Being slightly separated from the main house meant I didn’t get easily distracted and I didn’t have to tidy up at the end of the day. Perfect.

At the end of the garden we want to let things go slightly wild and we’re also planning on planting some fruiting trees and having room for vegetables.

So here’s the working plan.

Imagine lots of box hedging around the boarders. A mini-Versailles if you will. Really mini.