Be Excellent To Each Other

It is double brilliant because there are two work surfaces!

The level of organisation there make me want to cry - it's so neat and tidy, I'm very envious as none of the other life forms in my house can keep anything tidy, all they do as accumulate shit and dump it everywhere.

We’re tackling the awful dining room this week.

This room has multiple problems. Not least is the ceiling as we managed to flood the room above it about a. Week after moving in so the ceiling paper has been hanging off since then. Oh, and the carpet, of course. The carpet that doesn’t reach to the patio doors because they extended the room by a single metre on the right side, but not the left, so we have this triangular extension with a different flooring in. Anyway, stripping the ceiling this morning, then we went in a tour of all the places that do flooring locally and I have only just stopped shaking at how expensive it is going to be for flooring in that one room (not helped by that stupid extension adding a whole metre onto the length of the room).

So I’ve chosen some wallpapers for two of the walls and I wanted to match the blue from the main paper but it’s looking very dark in isolation, so I’m not sure. Obviously have to replace all the lights etc. stripping the ceiling we found where they used to have a central pendant light which they moved to the weird arse place that it is now.

I was wondering if because of where the pendant fitting is, it might more sense to replace it with something a little more directional, like this:

Like this

We have LED strips in the bedroom which is around the same size as your dining room and they are very effective, though it doesn’t show well on photos.

What kind of light do those give off, Dr Z? Is it a warm or cool light? I like a warm toned light but I’m always a bit wary of LEDs as I find it hard to judge the colour until they’re in situ.

It's slightly on the warm side, but not terribly so. Probably 3000K or 4000k for the light temperature. Some of the online retailers let you filter by temperature.

Yeah, I’ll take a look around at things like that. I need to find a couple of wall lights, too.

Trying to keep reminding myself that things look worse before they look better.

Ceiling is almost finished being stripped of anaglypta. Now stripping the walls.

Felt a sharp pain as I was taking wallpaper off and realised that the friction of where the back of my fingers was touching the rough wall as I was using the scraping tool it has worn off all the skin on the back of my fingers and was making them bleed.

This is coming along slowly (can only work in it at odd times), but the ceiling is stripped and paired. The weed work stripped, filled, sanded and painted to match the ceiling colour. The walls have been stripped where needed and painted. The radiator has been painted a colour to go with the wallpaper that will be on that wall. The flooring is up. We wallpapered the first of two walls today (each is having a different paper).



The lights are arriving on Monday. We’ll replace the outlets and switches in the room, too. Once the floor is in we can put the cabinets in and get the dining table back in place at last. Can’t wait to have this room finished and I’m glad it won’t be a third Christmas as it was.

Papering the final wall today.

Finished for today. All the wallpapering is done now. The painting needs minute touch ups, but really now we’re waiting for a floor, and then we can put the lighting in, and the furniture. Can’t wait to move the dining chairs and armchair, etc in as they are all piled in the living room at the moment.

That's looking really good. Nice work!

Thanks. I’m quite achey but it’s going to be worth it. Definitely on the home stretch now

Mimi, that looks fantastic

Thanks, Kov. The floor will be going down in a fortnight. I honestly can’t wait to get all of the furniture back in there as it’s all in the living room and hallway and driving me bananas.

I think we might tackle the main bedroom after Christmas, too.

We had some spare rolls left afte4 having the stairs done, so wallpapered one end of the kitchen this afternoon.

Very pleased with how it’s come out.

I really like that wallpaper.

Your stairs must be as trippy as fuck.

Hehehe, I meant the wall above the stairs, but it did read somewhat differently.

You have a sofa in the kitchen?

He's lying about the stairs. That's a studio flat, and everything's in one room. He's stood on the toilet to take the photo

Finally got the flooring in today, so we can put the bookcases into place today and then put all of the furniture back. It’s all been piled in the living room for about a month and I cannot wait to finally have some space back.

Yep, it’s a fairly long kitchen so has all the cupboards and appliances at one end and the settee and table at the other.

Looking good there folks!

Mimi, you just need to get this bit.

You know, after I posted it I went in there to check that it wasn’t there IRL, even though I KNEW it wasn’t.

Storage is in place now.

All done. Super tired and glad it’s finished TBH. I’m so glad we don’t have a third Christmas with that awful smelly carpet and partly collapsed ceiling, though.

Sorry, missed the other photo.

Looks super!

That’s so much better. Way to go Russell & Mimi.

Thanks! This was it before, so I am glad we’ve made it ‘ours’ at last. Check out the old carpet. It was awful and smelled weird.

Dramatic turnaround! Well done.

Thanks, Bik!

Looks superb, good work.

Good work!!

Thank you, good folks!

I still can't get over the weird triangle extension, there must be a good reason, but it seems like a lot of expense for very little extra usable space?

I can think of two reasons.

They really didn't like the neighbours on the right. Hated them. Couldn't even bear to have the boundary fence in view when looking at the garden.

They got a really, *really* good deal on patio doors that were just a bit too wide.

Or third reason, the people they got to put new patio doors in fucked up the measurements and it was easier to do an extension than reorder. "No idea what you're talking about, all we did was put the new door in, must be an optical illusion"

The mystery of the triangular extension is pretty famous around here. All the neighbours know about it.

The house had two previous owners, one in 1953 (when it was built), and one in 1971… then us. I believe that the 1971 owners were the ones that put the extension in.

The neighbours either side of us are both very active women in their 60s-70s, and both knew the previous owners very well. I once asked each of the neighbours did they know anything about the extension, and they each said ‘oh, the triangle, what on earth is that about?’, or words to that effect.

It’s nothing to do with sun glare, because the garden is north-facing. It’s just so very odd.

One thing we did discover when redecorating is that the floor used to have laminate tiles around the edge, and presumably a square carpet or rug in the middle (because they’d left the laminate tiles in place, though many had come loose). It made it clear, however, that when they decided to carpet the room they made a purposeful decision to put a different flooring type in the triangle, where they laid some tongue and groove laminate.

I had assumed it had different flooring there because it came later, but no. It was a decision that was made.

Neither of us noticed the triangle when we viewed the house, somehow. It was at the height of the pandemic and you had five minutes to look at the entire house and to be fair I spent most of that in the garden.

Here is the clearest photo I have of it, pre-decorating.

At (presumably) the same time that they had the extension put in, they also moved the only ceiling light fixture from the centre of the room to the very edge of the room, next to the window (which was already the lightest part of the room).

I like it.

A place to eat one slice of pizza.

It's for spying on the neighbours through the little window without being seen

Nah, there is privacy glass in those windows, so it’s not even a good spy point.

Wow, that fireplace brings back memories of my childhood home.

Yeah, I think they were pretty much a universal find at some point. Apparently the husband of the previous owner refused to modernise it as it was so good, which makes no sense to me as that room has the world’s longest radiator.

Next to the worlds longest man, that looks tiny.

Hah!