Summer holiday home improvements

Hello! I hope you are all well? I thought I would show you some photos of some of the DIY and decorating we have been doing around the house over the summer holidays.

I am finding that one of the downsides of being a teacher is that the six week summer holidays seems like an eternity at the beginning. At the start of the summer, it is surely six months! It is dangerously easy to over-fill those precious weeks with all manner of jobs and actually find you have spent most of your summer with a paintbrush in your hand (apart from a glorious week in Suffolk). I am not moaning, just wishing I had balanced things a little more. 

But this summer we got lots of jobs done which make our home work better for us. Number one was a fresh coat of paint for the kitchen-diner which, although last decorated only a few years ago, takes an absolute battering from us as a family. Our kitchen is small and every inch works very hard, all the time. Add into that two children and a dog, and the paintwork can get pretty filthy. 

This is what our kitchen (the dining-room end) looked like: a gorgeous blue-green which I did like but always found cold. This room faces north-east and, while it's lovely in the morning, is bathed in blue-grey light throughout the afternoon. I often found it felt chilly and a bit busy, and what I very much wanted (needed) was a room which felt warm and calm. 

And so I talked John into letting me paint it, and talked my kind and ever-patient mum into helping me, and off we went.

We filled and sanded. 

We began coat number one.

And then coat number two.

Then, after a third coat on the blue-green walls (but not the white ones) we undercoated the woodwork. I may have been heard muttering if that I ever talk about painting woodwork a dark colour again, stage an intervention.

More undercoat. There seemed to be a lot of undercoating. 

And then, finally, done. 

All walls, radiator and woodwork are painted in a soft pale pink (Julie's Dream by Little Greene Paint), a gorgeous warm colour which is a little reminiscent of the colour of bare plaster. A warm, almost beige neutral that glows in the sun but is still enough of a colour to work with the white kitchen cupboards and tiles, and colder tones of the grey quartz worktop.

When I came down one morning and saw the whole room bathed in early-morning sunshine, I knew we had done the right thing. The room feels both warmer and calmer. We have still not hung any pictures or fairy lights and I may not for a while. 

While Mum and I were painting the kitchen, John and my Dad were tackling the decking. We inherited with this house (seven years ago!) a large area of decking outside the kitchen. It is a great use of space but the decking has increasingly become wobbly and uneven to the point of being one large trip-hazard. Badly laid to begin with, it had not worn well.

But we had a plan! We (royal we - John and my Dad did the work) pulled up each board, repaired the rotten joists beneath - many of which had sunk, hence the uneven surface - then flipped the boards over and re-laid them. They laid them in a staggered, brick-like fashion, instead of the "striped" fashion you can see in the picture below.

Here are the boards in their new pattern. Most are old although there are some new ones in there too.

They started at the patio doors and moved backwards so that we could always use the decking if we needed too.

Finally, once the boards were down and edged, my mum and I jet washed them....

...and then Bella and I treated them with a natural-colour stain. 

I planted ferns in the space under the large rhododendron bush.

Then we moved all the furniture back into its place and commented that there's a reason why people do this kind of work in the spring - so that they can enjoy it over the summer, rather than at the onset of autumn.

And finally we gave Bella's room a quick lick of paint, changing her two pink walls into a deep forest green, and updating the very old and tired blinds and curtains at the two windows. 

Bella keeps her room meticulously tidy and is responsible for her own cleaning, changing the bedding etc. So it's only fair that she can decorate it how she chooses. 

This spurred me on to do something to cheer up our very tired and sad upstairs toilet (our main family bathroom is on the ground floor). We've never done anything to this room apart from paint it white and pull off the plastic tiles that covered the floor seven years ago. After a while you just stop noticing certain things. But I added more plants and hung a gallery wall of floral pictures and it feels nicer. We still need a new sink and to re-paint the room but it will do for now 

I have many more photos of the things we've been up to over the last two weeks - it hasn't all been decorating - which I'll share soon. I am consciously trying to squeeze every last drop out of the summer holidays before I return to work next week and there's still a couple of days left.