Original Kitchen
I’d been lovingly doing up the house for a couple of years and apart from a lick of paint, I had consciously not touched the kitchen. You see it just didn’t work. It was a big open space but not big enough to include a dining table or anything substantially functional. And it was cut off to the deck which is where I did so much entertaining. A renovation plan had been brewing… Continue reading
The old laundry door – had to go!
The vestibule area was an unusable space. I had grand plans to eventually re-work this whole space so all I could try to do was lighten and brighten and make its usability more friendly. The previous owners had built a single bi-fold door for the laundry area that, would flap around should there be a window or door open. It was bulky and well, ugly don’t you think?!
Fireplace after hours of trying to strip back the stain
I wish. There was going to be no lounging about in this room. Where to start…. Well the fireplace. I’m not sure if the surround was original or not. It’s hard to tell but the woodwork is not symmetrical. Certainly I think the tiles and cast iron hearth were but the rest, I’m not too sure. Continue reading
I think the picture speaks for itself. It wasn’t pretty. The skirting boards, door jambs, picture rail and timber fret work had the same maroon treatment plus there was the added bonus of a wallpaper freeze. I left Mum to tackle the removal of the wallpaper as I just didn’t have the time (or the patience) to give to that joyful job. Continue reading
The bricked-up fireplace had been opened up again, the hole in the floor covered and the wall patched but my work here was just beginning. The trims needed to be freed of the hideous maroon stain/paint and the ceiling and walls were flaking. Oh and a cast-iron fire surround and mantle needed to be sourced. Deep breaths…
Continue reading
Anyone who’s renovated a house while living in it knows that there’s always one room that ends up being the dumping ground for furniture, boxes, stuff yet to be re-homed and junk that materialises from nowhere. That was my front bedroom. Besides the mammoth task of re-depositing said stuff, there was the even bigger task of bringing this room back inline with the rest of the house.
![Front [storage] bedroom](https://girlupaladder.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/img_7609.jpg)
Aside from the obvious items, I had no idea what was in here or where it materialised from (or where I re-housed it to be honest!)
Time is a precious thing and certainly if I had more time, the second bedroom would have received much more love than it did. But with a move in date looming, I stuck to the basics and made it as habitable as possible. It is what it is and sometimes, you’ve just got to go with it. Much like the dining room, it really needed complete stripping back. But aside from re-plastering a patch of wall where the coat rail was stuck (it removed the plaster back to the bare brick) and replacing a rotten floorboard, my main tasks were stripping back the trims and painting.
The dodgy (and sticky) coat rail.
And the winner is… EBB
The dining room is probably one of the darkest rooms in the house. I wanted to create a cosy dining room without closing it in even more.
IN MY MIND’S EYE I’D ALWAYS PICTURED IT BEING PINK
Yes, pink. Not a lolly-pop, girly, girly kind of pink but a more subtle and sexier pink. As with any colour there are thousands upon thousands of variations and shades but given I could picture what I wanted, I could narrow the field down considerably before I even started.
girl up a ladder 