Internal walls

Come on, be honest, am I the worst and laziest blogger you ever have known? I suspect I am. Still, I will persevere and continue to document our house even if I do it 9 months out of date. In this post, I share some pictures of our new internal walls being put up.

 

New doorway to the main bedroom (used to be a cupboard in the sewing room).

 

New cupboard in Dot's room.

 

New walls for Dot's room (which used to be our main, back bedroom)

 

This is a bit of the original kitchen, but will eventually be a handy under stairs storage area for the bikes.

 

New kitchen wall. You can just see the old fridge cupboard in the far right of the photo.

Sweet dreams for guests

For far too long we've been making our guests stay in a room with no curtains. So with an immanent visit from Mum Guthrie we decided now was the time to take matters in hand and put up the curtain pole in the sewing/spare room.

Jon! Look at what you're sawing!

It's still a temporary curtain but at least Mum can get changed without getting the neighbours hot under the collar.

Bonus Day

At the end of last week I decided to take today off last minute. How exciting! And I've spent most of the day working on our sitting room curtains They're nearly ready so make sure you keep an eye on the blog for when they go up! I don't even want to admit how long it's been since we had the windows done (4 months), or how long the bare curtain pole has been up (over a month).

How useful it is to have a room set aside for sewing. It makes it so much easier!

Riding my workmate.

The cupboard in Hannah's sewing room had a missing shelf. This may have broken/been thrown out in the early days of the House of Love. Crazy times. Shit happened. Can't remember. We threw a lot of stuff out.

I inherited a Black & Decker Workmate from my dad's friend Neville - He had two! - so I decided to get my saw on and cut her a new shelf of an afternoon.

 Correct technique.

Plank.

An expensive way to make a rustic coldframe

Just a reminder of what the house looked like before the upstairs windows disappeared.

This is why our windows disappeared. This man took them out!

Look! No window.

And the back.

Our new window about to go in.

Filling the gaps.

Eeeeek!! (Don't worry, they made good!)

We're keeping the old windows for a cold frame!

Spot the difference

p.s. sorry we haven't made the coldframe yet. Next job for Stephen?

Rainy day painting.

It was well rainy and I had a day off work. I didn't want to leave the house and I'd wanted (been told) to finish painting Hannah's cupboard doors.

 It doesn't look that rainy, but I'm telling you, OK?

That was one coat. I left it to dry and did another coat a couple of days later.

 I opted for wet-look on the handles. Can you see the drip I captured on the left-handle? It gives the cupboard a sense of kinetic energy.

 And then it looked like this. Much better, OK?

Slide show

When Stephen was closing down his surgery (he was a dentist before he retired to be our full-time handy-Dad) Jon and I went to help him move things. Actually we were there making a film and we wanted to go and pick cool stuff for our new house but let's pretend we were there to help. While there I found these really nice x-ray holders, to keep x-rays of teeth. I thought they would be fun a fun way to display some of Jon's massive, and basically pointless, slide collection. I think I was right, here's one in my sewing room.

The sewing/spare room

So we realised that sharing a room* wasn't working for me and Jon. Basically Jon has too much stuff. And whilst the music/spare room combo didn't work (keyboards don't make for a restful sleeping environment) the music/sewing combo didn't work either. So there was only one thing left to try, merging my sewing room into the spare room. And I think it's worked out rather well. It meant I couldn't keep the big table but luckily the Lloyds had this rather nice blue number knocking about in the garage. I also get to have a day bed, which, quite frankly, has been a dream since I was a small child, it just feels very decadent.

artwork supplied by Jenny Lloyd, more wall coverings to follow

* I should point out that we still share the bedroom (we're only 30).

Sewing room pictures.

Apart from the washing line of postcards/ideas/hopes&dreams, Hannah's sewing room was looking a bit bare. Luckily, Nell and Paddy gave us each two super prints reflecting our hobby-time interests (n.b. "hobby-time" is not a scheduled part of our days and does not appear on Google calendars; these are ad-hoc amusements fitted in between planned activities). Hannah's are of sewing stuff and mine are of a camera and a record deck. I'm not happy with the current placement of mine in my new stu-stu, so you'll have to look back here to see them.

Hannah did the hanging, whilst I did the up-a-bit-down-a-bit.

Having perfected the hang, Hannah did proud-face.

And then decided to take a picture of herself in the mirror, that also highlights the terrible paint job I did on her cupboard doors (because I thought they were my cupboard doors at the time, and I just don't give a damn about such niceties.)

washing line

No, not for laundry! This washing line is for cards and things. It's in a very similar vein to our pinterest wall in the kitchen. Somewhere to put all those things you don't want to throw away but don't want to put in frames, and you can add and move things about too.

Music/Sewing mash-up!

We had another rethink the other day. With us both (yes; the both of us, thanks!) having hobby/past-times placing demands on our premium E17 space, we realised that something had to give if were ever to have the longed-for and elusive spare room.

 As you can see here, there are keyboards AND sewing machines in the SAME room! 

Admittedly, this is now a lot more cramped than the photo would imply, but...

 ...now we have what you might call a spare room next door.

 The luxurious double-double futon (two layers, for two people) folds up into a sofa for comfortable loft-style living for young, chic, jet-setters whilst interning at famous London auction-houses. Features chill-out zone by the window.

It's curtains to undressed windows

Well actually that awful pun is a bit premature. I have started our bedroom curtains but I'm not finished yet. And my spool just ran out half way along a seam and I didn't notice until the end. So I'm in a bad mood with my curtains. I'm going to try and cheer myself up by showing you my work in progress. This is the first time I've made lined curtains so it's a new experience for me. I'm more used to making dresses out of curtains rather than actually using them to make curtains.

You can see that one thing hampering my curtain making is the fact that my sewing room has become a bit of a box repository in our enthusiasm for clearing the sitting room. Look how tidy it used to be!

I've never sewn anything with this much fabric before. I wish I had more space!

I will keep you updates on my curtain progress but I have a busy week ahead of me so don't hold your breath!

Finally we do some more work

Don't get too excited though, it's minimal.

Jon fixes our cooker. At least we thought the only problem was the numbers being rubbed off but then it burnt Ellen's birthday biscuits. Seems 50 is actually about 150. Might need to buy a new cooker.

What's this?  A toilet with a horrid plastic seat that's threatening to fall off or snap in two.

a bit of DIY later and......

ta da! Well done Jon. A nice new black wood loo seat, what a stylish bathroom.

Aha, now we see the reason that the house decorating has slowed so much. I've got my sewing room (notice I can now have 2 sewing machines and an ironing board up, all at the same time and permanently). But also I have been beavering away on a dress to wear at Mum's wedding next weekend. After sewing and unpicking the zip three times I gave up and just left it a bit wonky.