My Flat in Progress: July & August 2018

Time for another DIY update!

After getting stuck into lots of projects in May and June, we pressed pause again in July because of the hot weather. I totally wilt in the heat and so does my dad so neither of us really wanted to be stuck in the hottest room of my flat during a heatwave.

I continued to think about things like where to hand pictures and what furniture I was (eventually) going to put where, but all I really achieved in July was ordering a bigger light shade for the living room ceiling and hanging it up slightly wonkily. (It does look good, though!)

In August I started framing more pictures, mounting them nicely and adding some acid-free paper at the back to help protect them from my cheap frames. I also added D-rings and picture cord to a whole bunch of chunk box frames which had hooks so far inside the deep frames that it was almost impossible to hang them as they were.

I'd only noticed this, er, helpful feature after I'd bought the frames and put pictures in them, and I was a bit worried I was just going to have to buy another batch of frames from somewhere else and that my cheap frames were going to have turned out to be a total waste of money... so I was very happy when the D-ring and picture cord plan worked out! (Buying a bunch of D-rings and picture cord was much cheaper than replacing the frames would have been).

While I was busy prepping pictures, my dad hung the first thing up on the wall in my lounge: my noticeboard. (Very important!).

I'd already stuck a whole load of postcards up on my old pinboard to decorate it last year, and it had been hanging around waiting to get hung up ever since. I'm glad we waited, because this summer my mum decided to buy a bigger noticeboard for her kitchen and I got to snaffle her old one... which was bigger than my old one, and a bit fancier too with proper fixings for screwing it to the wall instead of being held up by a slightly wobbly bit of cord. Of course, this meant that I had to do a bit of rearranging of the decorative bits and bobs but that was no hardship (rearranging decorative bits and bobs is the best bit!).

My workspace is at one end of my living room, with my desk in the bay window (perfect for photo sessions!). The noticeboard is actually behind me as I work but it's still really convenient for pinning important work and life stuff where I won't lose it.

 

The wall of shelves look nice and organised but it won't be staying like this. The two bookcases will be moving into my bedroom when it's decorated, and a second unit matching the one with my printer on it will be going in this space instead. I'm not sure what (if anything) will go next to that, or where I'm going to put my stereo... but these are problems for solving on a future occasion.

If you stand back a bit, the lounge doesn't look quite so tidy!

As you can see, I still have an island of furniture and other stuff in the middle of the room while we're working on the bedroom. There are pictures spread everywhere, too, as I'm gradually getting everything framed and mounted and trying out possible arrangements.

After hanging the noticeboard, I finally made a start on pulling the tabs of all my curtains about a year and a half after we first hung them up! They still need a bit of tweaking but you can see the difference it's already made: the curtain on the left is unpulled, and the right pulled. 

I pulled the tabs of the lounge curtains (above), and the ones from the spare bedroom and kitchen (below) and I'll do the bedroom curtains when they're eventually hung back up (they're currently shoved in a drawer under a bed in my parents' house while my bedroom is still a messy work-in-progress).

I also finally turned up the last of the net curtains (the ones in the living room), which was a job that took so little time I have no idea why I'd not got round to it sooner.

Still working on small tasks because of the heat we replacced a whole bunch of the old electical socket covers and light switches around the house (because despite our cleaning efforts the old ones were still pretty grubby with old paint, etc), and we swapped some furniture around.

That empty bookcase (previously located in the oh so stylish furniture island in my lounge) got moved into the kitchen for my pots and pans and tins and things (my kitchen cabinets themselves are super musty so I'm stuck using freestanding shelving until I can get the kitchen renovated)... and the shelf unit which previously stood in this corner of the kitchen got taken to my parents house and stashed in their shed ready for repainting.

The shelf unit matches the one in the lounge that's currently got my printer on it, which is also going to get repainted a lovely fresh gloss white at some point - along with my coffee table which has been in serious need of a new coat of paint for at least a decade. My mum is great at painting furniture, so I'm hoping she'll teach me all her secrets!

Elsewhere in the flat, we tidied up the mess in the bedroom and in the hallway...

 

 

... cleaned the DIY-related dust from the bedroom floor...

... and put together the giant jigsaw puzzle of hardboard, nailing it down ready for my bedroom carpet to be fitted later in the year.

 

Oh, and I also cleaned a few of the old hearth tiles to get a better look at the pattern before we covered them up again! Aren't they pretty?

Hopefully I'll have lots more exciting home improvements to share with you guys soon! In the meantime, you can catch up with the DIY story so far here.

My Flat in Progress: May & June 2018

For the first year and a half of living in my "new" flat, I slept on a single bed in the main bedroom surrounded by boxes and furniture and general chaos while my parents and I worked on renovating the spare bedroom and the lounge.

We pressed pause last summer to focus on other important life stuff... then, almost a year to the day, picked up our tools again this May. I moved my single bed into the spare bedroom, squeezed the boxes and furniture and everything else in wherever I could find space (including under beds, on top of wardrobes and in the back of cupboards at my parents house), and we started work in the newly empty bedroom.

Just like in the previous two rooms, there was lots of filling and sanding to do to prep the walls and woodwork... and a few sections of plaster needed patching up as well.

It's a lovely big room, which will be great when I'm actually using it as a bedroom but in the meantime this just means that there's a lot of ground to cover!

We had to take up the old laminate flooring a little earlier than we'd planned, because we had to get a surveyor in to check out a possible damp problem (which thankfully turned out not to be a damp problem after all, hurrah!).

This was intitially an annoying disruption, but actually it turned out to be rather brilliant.

I'd been feeling really guilty about having taken almost a whole year off from the renovations - I knew that I'd been too busy to focus on it, but I still felt irrationally bad about it, like maybe I'd just been being lazy and I should have magically got the main bedroom finished by now. But if we'd finished the bedroom last year and had carpet fitted and bought furniture... the floorboards would still have had to come up this summer to investigate the potential damp problem, and just thinking about moving all that furniture, taking up the carpet, etc, makes me feel exhausted. Taking up floorboards when the whole room was empty because we were decorating it, though? Perfect timing.

Taking up the flooring revealed some lovely old fireplace tiles, which have sadly been damaged over the years. Okay, so they don't look too lovely in this photo but there's actually a sweet little floral pattern under there. I'm thinking about drawing it before we get the carpet fitted, so I can maybe use the motif elsewhere in the flat in the future.   

The bedroom renovations continued in June: the walls gradually got painted (goodbye dark purple!)...

 

 ... and my dad repaired more bits of plaster...

... replaced a missing section of skirting board, re-opened the vent in the chimney...

...and did a whole bunch of other little repairs which collectively have made a real difference to the neatness of the room.

Elsewhere in the flat, we got the bay window roof repaired and (no longer paranoid that the roof was going to fall in) I moved everything back into the living room. It was really great to unpack boxes, put stuff back on shelves, and move my desk out of the kitchen where I'd been working sandwiched between the oven and my drying launding for weeks.

There's currently an island of furniture and boxes (displaced from my bedroom while we're working on it) in the middle of my lounge but it's still wonderful to have the rest of the room looking nice again.

Here's how my office shelves were looking this summer - I'm so pleased with them!

I've been doing lots of tidying and re-organising and decluttering this summer and I'm sloooowly getting things set up how I want them.

I'm also slowly working on my "finally frame and hang all the artwork I've collected over the years" project. It was really exciting getting the first things framed. It turns out actual proper frames (even super cheap ones) look approx a zillion times better than clip frames. Who knew??

As you can see I've opted to frame pretty much everything in simple white frames. I might upgrade them to something fancier in the future, but for the moment these are working really well. It's easy to find cheap white frames like this in all the sizes I need, collectively they're not breaking my budget too badly, and they'll look really great on the plain white walls of my flat.

It's obviously time consuming buying frames and custom mounts and getting the pictures neatly framed and mounted, but the real time-suck is the hours spent thinking where to hang everything! I've accumulated so many different pictures over the years, and there are so many different possibilities for where I could hang them all in my flat. I've changed my mind about the grand picture-hanging plan a frankly ridiculous number of times over the past year and will probably continue to change it again with great frequency over the coming months.

Despite all this indecision, at the end of June we finally got the first batch of pictures up on the wall.

I was beyond thrilled when we hung these eight pictures up - it was a much more exciting moment than it looks from that slightly gloomy photo! They're a set of pages from a vintage book, The Good Housewife's Enyclopedia, which has some really gorgeous illustrations in it - you can see them all here.

 

I had three of the pages on the wall in my old flat and the paper darkened gradually over time due to the sunlight, so they no longer matched the rest of the set. I was a bit worried about how they'd look hanging together because of this but actually the reason that photo is so gloomy is because we've hung the pages up in my dark and gloomy hallway (which gets very little natural light)... and the gloom helps hide how the pages are all different colours. Hurrah!

It might seem weird to have hung pictures up in the hall when we've not decorated that part of the flat yet but the joy of this space is that I'm not going to be putting any furniture in it, so I don't need to wait until I've bought and/or planned furniture to work out where the pictures need to go. Decorating the "big" wall in my hallway is also soooo far down the priority list of my renovation plans that these pictures will likely sit happily on this undecorated wall for years before I need to take them down again.

More flat updates soon! In the meantime, you can catch up with all my home renovation posts here. 

My Flat in Progress: Autumn 2017

By the end of last summer we'd got two rooms in my fixer-upper flat mostly sorted: the living room and the little spare bedroom were both decorated and carpeted, and I finally had some shelves to unpack my stuff onto.

The living room was still looking pretty empty! I had some shelves, a desk and a chair (and a little step-stool I use when I'm taking photos on the desk)... and that was about it. It was great to have lots of space to spread out and make a crafty mess in, but it was a bit too minimal for my taste.

The first new addition I made in the autumn was a cheap rug from IKEA. I needed a rug quite urgently as my bargain basement carpet isn't very hard wearing and shows every mark (not ideal).

I think the grey is a bit dark for the space, but it does the job for the moment and is a vast improvement on the carpet offcuts I was using before. (I'm still using a carpet offcut under my desk and chair in the bay window, though. One problem at a time...).

I took a small carpet offcut along with me to IKEA, to hold it against all the rugs and also to start looking at possible sofas - this one matches my living room carpet perfectly!

I love bright colours but I've decided to opt for neutrals and lots of white paint when initially decorating and furnishing my flat. I want the space to be nice and light but I also want to fill my flat with colourful things without it getting overwhelming, and honestly it's making the decision-making process so much simpler at this early stage! I may well gradually start adding in more colour later on, but for now this Buy All The Neutral Things strategy is working for me and I'm sticking to it.

The second (very important) addition to the living room: a pair of china dogs in the fireplace!

These fellas belonged to my grandparents, and I adore them. They just fit in the little alcove where the fireplace used to be, and they look great with the black tiles which were there when I moved in and which I'll be keeping until I can afford to reinstate the fireplace (so, probably for a few years at least!).

Next, I rescued my coffee table from the kitchen where it was buried under lots of DIY supplies. The coffee table (a hand-me-down from my parents) is in serious need of repainting, but I love it. It's actually a set of three tables - one large table and two smaller ones which slot underneath it - but the second small table was still in the kitchen covered in DIY supplies at this point.

I moved a couple of pot plants from the shelves onto the end of the table, to give them more light and to make room for a third plant on the shelves. Teeny little changes, but positive ones.

(I'm not sure why there's printer paper in the printer in that photo because my printer hasn't worked since I moved in!).

I didn't get round to putting up a noticeboard at the "office" end of the living room... but I thought about it! I decided to put it in the space above the printer (which will hopefully be replaced by one that actually works at some point), and made a start on the most important part of this process: covering it in pretty things.

My parents moved house last summer and bought a few things for their new place, which meant I gained some more hand-me-down furniture: lots of 1970s Habitat chests of drawers. Sadly the matching wardrobes got left behind when my parents moved, but the drawers will be super useful.

As you can see, I was wearing suitably retro (and suitably orange) trousers when I moved them all into my flat and started cleaning them. For a few days my flat was full of drawers piled everywhere as I cleaned them all then carefully matched up the woodgrain to put them back in the right place.
  

There are four sets of drawers in total; I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing with them all long-term, but for the moment two are on the landing, one went in my (still very chaotic) bedroom, and I had space for the fourth in my living room.

It was great to finally be able to get my TV out of its box and watch DVDs on something other than my laptop. I can't get a TV signal yet as I need to sort out a new arial, but: baby steps! There was also just enough space next to the drawers to tuck a teeny side-table, one of a set of three currently dotted about my flat and another very welcome hand-me-down from my folks. 

Elsewhere in my flat, my spare room was finally looking like a bedroom (I'll share some photos of it next time) and the main bedroom was still looking a bit chaotic but emptier than it had been for months. It was so nice having some floorspace again and not having to climb over and around two beds, a desk, and stacks of boxes to get to anything.

All the most stylish bedroom walls had doors propped against them in 2017, you know.

(Please also note the laundry basket: that photo is the very definition of keeping it real).

Aaaand, that's about it for 2017, I think! I had lots more things on my To Do list, of course, but with life and work (and helping my parents get their new place looking shipshape) my home renovation was largely on pause until this spring.

I did spend a lot of time in the autumn and winter thinking about pictures, though! What to hang where, what to keep, how best to frame them, and so on. I hadn't hung any pictures up since moving out of my old flat way back in 2011, so the prospect of finally getting some art on the walls again was very exciting. As I type this, the picture-hanging project is still very much a work in progress but hopefully I'll have some nice snaps to share with you sometime soon...

 Catch up on all my flat renovation posts here.

My Flat in Progress, Summer 2017: Shelves!

With an ongoing home renovation project, your usual work/life balance becomes a work/life/DIY juggling act and sometimes that means one (or more) of the balls gets dropped.

Last summer, my flat got put on the backburner while I focused on helping my parents move house then settle into their new place. We took up the old laminate flooring and got carpet fitted in two rooms in June (very exciting!) and I moved the last of my furniture and boxes from my parents' house... and that was about it.

On paper, that doesn't sound like much but actually it made a huge difference to the experience of living in this flat. Two lovely clean rooms to put my stuff in! And shelves to put that stuff on after months of living out of boxes! Hurrah!

It felt kind of amazing - particularly because some of the stuff I was unpacking had been in boxes ever since 2011 when I'd split up with my then-boyfriend and moved back in with my parents to save money (god bless their patience, they are so glad to finally no longer have me living in their spare room!!).

I spent a few very enjoyable afternoons working out where I was going to put all my shelves, then slowly unpacking boxes to fill them. Arranging and rearranging things and generally feeling pretty darn thrilled to have this space to call my own.

One end of my living room is my "home office", which is a phrase that always makes me laugh. It sounds so serious when all it really means is "some shelves and a desk and a printer that doesn't work properly".

Then gradually my personal stuff takes over from all my craft supplies: books of poetry instead of books about sewing, photo albums instead of boxes of felt, etc, etc.

Oh, and I finally had space for my potplants again!

I missed my pot plants while my parents were "babysitting" them. A little bit of green and life in a space is so transformative, even if my potplants are all a bit funny looking thanks to years of my terrible plant parenting.

One "flaw" with this flat is that the windowsills are very narrow so I can't put plants on them. I'm still deciding where to put them for the best, but in the meantime they're squeezed onto shelves as close to the windows as possible. Some in my living room, some in the spare room and some in the kitchen (not pictured).

Mmm... lovely shelves...

Obviously it would have been nice if we'd got loads more DIY projects done last summer (it's always great to get stuff ticked off the To Do list), but it was actually really great just having some quiet time to sit and appreciate the work we'd done so far.

It was also lovely to spend time thinking about things like "where should I put these teacups?"...

... and "what should I put in this basket?"...

... instead of thinking about stuff like appliances and plasterwork and power tools. Simple pleasures, huh?

More flat updates coming soon! In the meantime, you can catch up with all my previous home renovation posts here.