The living room

It begins with the living room. This is the room we spend most our (waking) time in at home, so it made a good deal of sense to start here.

 How it looked before we moved in

When we moved in, the room looked dated, with plain, creamy wallpaper and a thick old carpet that had clearly seen better days (not to mention a bit too much cat in places). Decades of smoking had given the coving a less-than-attractive yellow-brown hue.

We started on the living room in January of this year (2016). The first job was to strip all the old wallpaper, with a view to painting the walls instead.

The old, shot plaster

We soon discovered that the wallpaper was doing a good job of covering up some rather old, crumbling and pretty well shot plaster work. A builder's signature over the fireplace revealed that the room was last re-plastered in 1967!

Luckily for us, we have a friend who is a plasterer by trade, so we had the whole room re-done... apart from the ceiling, which we decided to leave well alone, just painting over the old wallpaper instead.

Plastering done and a few mist coats later, the room was ready to paint.

But, in early spring we decided "why not lift up the old carpet and see what sort of condition the floorboards are in?" You can't beat bare boards, if they're in good nick and are painted or stained.

The carpet came up easily enough, but what I hadn't bargained on was how difficult it was to remove an old felt underlay, which had been glued to the boards at some unknown point in the last 50 years or so.

Hours of back breaking, scraping and scrubbing with sugar soap later, the boards were revealed. Blackened in places, covered in paint in others... clearly a floor sander was required.

At this point, summer intervened - we had people to see, places to go, a beach to sit on and lots of barbecues to be had, not to mention a wonderful holiday together, so the DIY mostly stopped. The walls did painted though.

The sanding begins

About a month ago, I finally bit the bullet and hired a floor sander. Sanding the floor was an immensely satisfying, if occasionally frustrating job (a fair amount of swearing is involved when the paper blows-out, for the third time, on a nail that stubbornly refuses to be punched below the board surface).

I naively imagined that I could get away without hiring an edging sander at the same time. We've got a hand sander I thought, so I can just use that to do the rest. This turned out to be a mistake (although I did stubbornly persevere for about 3 hours, using about 15 small sheets of 40 grit paper to do about 3 square feet of floor, until I could bear it no longer)  - which is why I've been doing the rest of the job this weekend with a hired edging sander.

Just the edging to go

Now all that remains is a few corners and a little bit of paint around the edges, so it's back to the hand sander today to finish the job off. Then the floor will be stained, if I can find time between now and Christmas.

The room isn't finished yet, there's still more painting to be done and we have yet to re-furnish, but it's definitely coming along. We're also having shutters installed in the next few weeks - a definite improvement on the old curtains.