Small home improvements

Hello! First of all, can I say thank you for all the lovely comments you leave me on this blog. It means so much and I really appreciate it.

I wanted to share a few small-ish home improvements that we have finished this winter and spring. Most of these have taken months and months to actually be completed but it is nice to tick some jobs off the list. (I love a list.) We have lived in this house for nine years now and still have not done much of the work we would like to do. Rooms constantly need to be decorated, leaks mended, plumbers and roofers phoned.

I'll start with the airing cupboard. This deep cupboard goes into the eaves from Angus's bedroom and goes back a surprisingly long way. It used to house a huge hot water tank which took up most of the space, and was really good for drying washing. However, a year ago, maybe longer, we replaced our very old boiler with a new combi-boiler, which was re-sited down in the garage. The upside to this was instantly improved water pressure, hotter radiators and cheaper gas bills, but the downside was no more hot water tank. When it was removed it left lots of holes in the walls and floorboards which we ignored for many, many months. 

We pulled up and threw out the scrap of carpet and John filled all the holes in the walls. My Dad repaired some of the broken and damaged floorboards and then Mum and I painted the whole space, walls, ceiling and woodwork, with white paint. 

John laid some ply boards on the floor, over the floorboards, and attached a plug-in wall light. Then my Dad built us some slatted (for air flow) shelves and put up a pole for hanging clothes. A team effort.

The storage is brilliant.

Shelves for towels on one side and bedding on the other, and everything clean and dust free. Handily, some hot water pipes still run through the cupboard helping to air everything. 

Next, the bathroom. Now, we had no intentions to do anything at all with the bathroom, We had a new shower, sink and toilet installed in December 2019 and as far as we were concerned, it was finished. However, we had been noticing damp appear in the bathroom and realised we had a slow leak which had been leaking into the wall between the bathroom and kitchen for a very long time.

John chiselled out the pipework, got a plumber in to fix the pipes and then left it to dry out. This is what our bathroom looked like from October to February. I stopped noticing it after a while.

Finally it was filled and sanded by John and then painted by my lovely mum and I. The final joy was the reinstallation of the towel rail - not more cold towels! 

While we were doing work, John added some more tiles to the foot of the shower - that wall gets much more splashed than we thought it would when we had the bathroom fitted - and we decided to change the paint colour since we were going to have to re-paint anyway.

The final step was to add a couple of shelves to the wall above the toilet for extra storage, something our bathroom is always lacking.

Next, the kitchen. I think I already showed you the wooden strips we added to the end panel in the kitchen.

(Can you see the water damage from the leak on the wooden floor? It will fade as it drys out.)

You can see where Ziggy chewed the panel when he was a puppy. We've looked at it like that for about seven years then finally, over February half term, I had the idea to cover it up with some strips of wood. We used pine (cheaper) which we stained with oak oil.

I liked it so much that I persuaded John to add some more to another corner of the kitchen.

We have had these shelves by the window for years. I thought they were going to solve all my storage problems but sadly they just became a dust trap and dumping ground, plus the veneer was going all yellow round the edge.

We took down the shelves, filled the holes and painted. Then, we set to work fixing more pine strips to this white, shiny end panel. We stained the pine strips beforehand, then cut them to size before attaching them. We used tile spacers to keep the spacing consistent. 

 

Finally I added a little lobster decoration from here. 

I love the warmth the wooden tones bring to the kitchen. When we had it fitted we wanted everything clean and white. I don't regret choosing the kitchen but would certainly choose something completely different (warmer, a softer colour, less clinical) today.