Holidays and DIY

10 days off, all one after the other and no fixed plans. That’s what we have in store and day 1 is today.

Paul hard at work

Of course the British weather has decided to play up and therefore, not beaten, Day 1 will be dedicated to decorating.

As I write on one side of the room Paul is stripping on the other – wallpaper that is! 🙂

The walls underneath aren’t too bad, they will need sanding a bit which I hate as dust seems to reach every nook and cranny in the house and I have painted some squares of colour on my newly plastered wall. I have chosen from the Dulux colour charts, 3 options from the Light and Space range and 3 options from the Once range. Maybe they’d like to send me one of their Paint Pods to trial and review? 🙂

Dulux colour pots

As per usual I have gone for plain light colours which I think make the room look open, airy and give an impression of more space. I do love seeing all the colours used in magazines but fear I would get fed up with them after a while and seeing as I won’t be convincing Paul to change the room every time a colour goes out of fashion this seems to be the best option. My choices are from the left, Frosted Dawn, Jasmine shimmer, Coastal glow, Barley white, Almond white (which we used at our last home for the front room) and Ivory Lace. So far my two favourites are Coastal glow and Ivory lace, luckily Paul agrees although he’d rather piant the room like the Spanish restaurant La Tasca ie terracotta and yellow!

I am hoping ladies and gentlemen that by the end of next week I will have photos of our finished Living room to show off.

Yesterday I went through the Next Made2order curtains and requested to be sent four samples to try out. The window is a large one, 3 metres across so will need a lot of material to cover it. we’re looking at at leat £200 – and that’s sale prices!

As for the fireplace I was toying with the idea of spraying it white as I’m not overkeen on the dark wood look but right now I’m going to wait until it’s all decorated and see then if it needs doing or not.

I have been looking at light fittings  as we have two wall lights and two ceiling lights. At the moment they are 2 x 80’s faded green shades a la Amityville Horror, remember the fringed lampshades?

"Paul" scratched into the wall under the wallpaper..a sign? 🙂

And a mirror for over the fireplace. Have a look at the photo here to see what we found scratched into the wall under the paper….Paul! How freaky is that? It must be a sign that we’re on the right track surely?  Shame we didn’t find a hidden letter going back to the 60’s when the house was built, maybe with directions to a buried treasure…yes,with X marks the spot!

It’s weird, but having just looked at a few bits to furnish the room, without choosing anything ridiculously expensive, I’ve managed to tot up about £750, that includes a new coffee table admittedly but it does show that it’s easy to spend a grand before you’ve even thought of changing your suite! Which of course I’d love to but we need to completely revamp the upstairs bathroom first (future blog material!)

And with all of this going on we also have friends round for a take away tonight…with their children so that’ll be a mad rush to get the place looking relatively tidy in time.

Happy weekends all, love Mari