My Flat in Progress: February 2017

If you've been reading my blog for a while you might remember that I moved to the seaside about a year ago and bought a flat. It was a big change, and an exciting one!

I'm living walking distance from the beach, which is amazing - I've been on so many walks since moving here and have started actively pining for the sea if I'm away from it for too long. My flat is a bit of a fixer-upper, though, and we (myself, with lots of help from my parents) have lots of projects to do to get it looking at its best.

We had a busy few weeks after I first moved in, cleaning everything, buying loads of important stuff like lightbulbs and a fridge and a new loo seat, and making a start on the decorating and DIY. Click here to see what we got up to!

February continued to be pretty DIY-focused and slightly chaotic. I was living out of boxes, with everything piled up in a corner of my bedroom next to two single beds (one for me, one for whichever of my parents was visiting that week), while we worked on the living room and spare bedroom.

Every time my parents came to visit, they brought me a few more boxes of my stuff (which was mostly still in storage at their house) or a bit of furniture. Moving in gradually like this meant I didn't have to spend money on a moving van, but also meant we had plenty of space to work on the messy DIY without worrying about where to put everything.

 

Juggling my creative business and my home renovation project was tricky at times and led to some interesting photo set-ups! (If you're curious, you can see the photos I was taking here and here).

 

This is one of the ways I was really lucky to have my parents helping me out - I'd put in some hours working towards a deadline, then join them in whatever bit of DIY we were working on that day. Together we moved everything forwards much, much quicker than I would have done on my own even if I had the skills to work solo on this stuff (which I do not). 

February was all about the walls.

The walls in the spare room were like the surface of the moon, lumps and craters everywhere, which took a lot of hours of filling and sanding to get looking smooth (god bless my dad and all the dust-covered hours he put in with the sander).

The spare room went from looking like this (on the left is how it looked when I moved in, on the right how it looked mid-filling)...

... to this. New light shade, freshly painted white walls, and new new wall vent (the new vent we'd fitted in January turning out not to be sturdy enough for the strong winds we get here on the coast!). Still lots to get done, but "finished" enough to serve as an actual bedroom for my first official houseguest!

 

We also filled and sanded bits of the living room walls, and my dad did a bit of replastering.

Was it fun discovering patches of the wall that needed replastering? It was not. Did it give me anxiety looking at this corner of my living room when it looked like that? It absolutely did.

It was a great relief getting everything patched up neatly!!

 

After I'd photographed those rather fabulous paint layers, of course.

As well as sanding, filling, replastering and painting assorted walls, we started prepping the window frames in the lounge (more filling and sanding)...

 ... and (after much online browsing and umming and ahhhing about prices and features) I bought some new appliances: a vacuum cleaner (I'd been borrowing my parents' hoover before then), and a washing machine. I was so excited about the washing machine I took a photo of the ceremonial first wash, haha.

 

As you can see, we patched up the underside of the kitchen counter a bit before installing the washing machine. The cabinets in my kitchen are not in great condition and are so musty that I'm not actually using them. I have a couple of shelving units standing in a corner instead, and the rest of my kitchen stuff packed up in crates.

It's not ideal, but - just like camping dormitory style surrounded by boxes, and doing photoshoots on a dustsheet amidst DIY chaos - it's only temporary and will be totally worth it in the long run!

More flat updates coming soon...