A Year of Living Uncomfortably

Well maybe not the whole year, but as today marks the one-year anniversary of moving in I thought I'd look back on what we've done to the house in that first year. Most of it wasn't at all uncomfortable of course, but for some of the time we were covered in dust, or shuffling around displaced furniture, or working stupid hours at evenings and weekends to get that last coat of paint on. Future years will almost certainly see slower progress, since our refurbishment fund is spent and any further significant work (like fixing the rest of the sash windows, replacing the roof, replacing the stairs, completing the other half of the loft conversion, ...) now depends on good bonuses or other such windfalls. But money well spent is soon forgotten in the face of the benefit it brings, as I'm reminded every time I take a shower.

Lounge
The walls of this house, pretty much without exception, had been plastered either by someone who didn't know what he was doing, or who had been asked to leave a "rough" effect. Whether or not it was done with Artex we were never quite sure, but as neither of us fancied living in what looked like an 80s nightclub (or a cave, in the case of the bathroom), we had to decide what to do about it. Of the three options available a simple coat of paint was the quickest and cheapest, the theory being that a single neutral colour would hide a lot of the imperfections in the walls.

It worked quite well, but the lesson here was: never use cheap paint. It took four coats to completely hide the flame-coloured rag rolling.

Still to do:
Compared to later finishes, the painting hasn't really worked. The wall lights tend to highlight the lumps and bumps, we haven't decorated above the picture rail so the badly-filled cable channels where previous owners fitted them are still visible, and the ceiling is in pretty bad shape. I'm sure we'll end up having this room skimmed, but that will probably have to wait until we fit a new fireplace. We still can't really decide whether to keep the wooden floor in here, or carpet it.

Small bedroom
The second option for dealing with uneven walls: heavy duty lining paper and a coat of paint. That's what we opted for in here. The results, while better than the simplistic approach taken in the lounge, are still not perfect. But for a spare room, they'll do for now. The first room to be carpeted, it's quite cosy now that the sash window has been renovated and draught-proofed, although it still needs some pictures hanging to relieve the bareness, and could probably use a headboard. It was finished off in May with the delivery of a set of small bedroom furniture.

Bathroom
It's not hard to remember how uncomfortable it was living with a small draughty bathroom and no shower, but it does seem like a distant nightmare. By far the most expensive refurb to date, we set a budget for this room, revised it upwards during the design process, and still blew it. It was worth it.

Still to do:
Fix the leak in the shower before the kitchen ceiling descends; give the walls another coat of paint (the fitters only did one coat and the coverage is not the best); fit some shelves to take bathroom ornaments and plants.

Study
The final project of the year, and almost certainly the most successful. For the walls and ceiling in here we decided to go for the replastering option and while it is the most expensive, the results are superb. Well worth the few hundred quid outlay and the weeks/months of mess. This is two rooms knocked into one and hence the largest room in the house, so the length of the project can't be taken as a guide to other rooms - everything took, more-or-less, twice as long.

Still to do:
Find and hang two sets of curtains. Refit the door. Build shelves in the (closed) fireplace at Nikki's end. Find and fit two light fittings (and rewire the switch to be the intuitive way round!). Hang pictures. Install a sofa bed. Tile the main fire place (with the wood-burning stove). Find a couple of easy chairs and maybe an occasional table.

Longer term we want to hire a joiner to build an arched open shelf unit between the two rooms.

What's next?
With very little budget remaining we're severely limited to what we can do in the next year, but we have already bought the paint for the kitchen. We're taking a simplistic approach here - knocking off the bumps and filling the hollows. A newly invented fourth approach to uneven walls, if you like. We're not investing in reskimming here until we can afford to have the whole room refitted, at which time there'll probably be some lights to move and what have you.

Sticking with painting projects, all the stripped doors in the house, which are the original panelled doors, need varying degrees of repair (filling and sanding), painting and replacement locks, latches and handles. We'd like them all to match (they're an eclectic mix at the moment: two original Edwardian brass jobbies, both a bit banged up, some bakelite monstrosities from the 40s/50s and two awful, cheap aluminium specimens from the 70s. We've found some really nice rim latches online that should fit the bill, at least for the upstairs where a total of five doors need doing.

Having experienced the luxury of carpet in the new study I know Nikki is really keen to have our bedroom carpeted, but that will obviously have to wait until it's been decorated and may therefore mean a compromise on the walls - to skim or not to skim. Current plan is to skim the ceiling only and use heavy duty wallpaper, but we may end up replastering the lot - why go through the mess twice, right?